Writing Quotes
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To me, obstacles in life build character. You have to be able to overcome adversity in order to succeed and appreciate the simple things life has to offer... that's where most of my inspiration for writing and singing comes from.
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One of the accidental joys of my writing life has been that I've had some lovely, surprisingly good fortune with readers, and I've brought readers to my dad's work. I can't tell you the joy that gives me. Because my father's work was masterful.
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Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.
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I'm enjoying writing songs that are more stripped back.
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In the country places of Ireland, writing is held in certain awe: a writer was a dangerous man from whom they instinctively recoiled.
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It's always really hard to kill off someone who you just really enjoy working with, writing for, and seeing on the screen.
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In all my life, I have never been free. I have never been able to do anything with freedom, except in the field of my writing.
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I was Paul Schrader's assistant for six months before I went to film school, and he's very much about knowing what's going to happen on every page before you even start writing dialogue - the entire plot and character arcs are mapped out.
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I love music. I think music is a big inspiration; I listen to it a lot when I'm writing. I really love cinematic music. A lot of the time, I make playlists for my characters when I act. I also make playlists for the scripts that I write.
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Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
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A great Chicano forebear of mine in writing is Rolando Hinojosa-Smith. He was writing good border mysteries for Chicano readers back in the '80s and '90s.
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I like to separate the music- and lyric-writing processes if I can. I'll sort of noodle around on my keyboard and my computer until I have a beat or a chord progression, I'll record it as a loop, export it to iTunes, then walk around with the loop and sort of talk to myself in the loop, and that's how I get the lyrics.
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For my writing, and because I love talking to young women about life, I often asked them which would they rather have - a father in the house with them while growing up or a big butt? I tell you 86 percent of the time, girls say a big butt because it gets them further.
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I was always writing. I've always been attracted to words and stories, communication.
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Prior to the invention of writing, our ancestors had to rely on memory, sketches, or music to encode and preserve important information.
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It's very strange writing science fiction in a world that moves as fast as ours does.
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I like the quiet it takes to pursue an idea the way I pursued 'Hamilton,' but I couldn't write a book, because there's no applause at the end of writing a book.
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Letters remind us that when we write we can bring back the best of times, even make time stand still, if only for a few minutes.
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In political sense, it doesn't really matter what I do on my own, but it's so important to rally some sort of collectiveness and reignite a collective vision, and I think that's something you can do effectively through art and music, and through writing and entertainment - and just through like, pop culture. It's about spreading ideas and making people think differently, essentially.
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I was writing poems when I was young, you know, because my father was a poet, so it was absolutely normal to follow my father.
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Remember, it is no sign of weakness or defeat that your manuscript ends up in need of major surgery. This is a common occurrence in all writing, and among the best writers.
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For me, 'risky' is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is.
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Even when I don't think I'm writing, I'm writing. There's some part of my brain geared toward making songs up, and I know it's collecting things and I know when I get a moment to be by myself, that's when they come out.
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When I started really writing fantasy, one of the things I noticed was a real absence of sexuality in the genre at all. And it's such a profound part of the human experience that it's a really big thing to leave out.
