Writing Quotes
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They were very persistent. They didn't stop writing or calling.
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I have no interest in writing, generally speaking, about America at all - even if it does continue to terrify me.
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When you're younger and a little more innocent, you write whatever [lyrics] comes naturally. But as you get used to writing you try to steer the sound and music to different music and throwing in the "kitchen sink" of sorts into the music. With that way, you end up putting in much more than before and you could even make much more next time around.
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The more practice you have, the less stressful writing is.
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If critics want to help me, let them come sit next to me while I'm writing.
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Writing books and being paid for it - it's not like winning the Lottery. You can't suddenly go, 'Yippee!' and start throwing tenners in the air. I've done pretty well out of it, but certainly not enough to say, 'Right, that's me set up for life.'
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When you're 19 and writing plays, you think every actor is full of it. They just can't handle your brilliant material.
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I'm very, very open to experimenting with different people and trying to find different methods of writing and making music.
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It's great for my daughter to see Beyonce and Taylor Swift, women that are in charge of their own careers, writing songs from their own perspective and taking people to task. That's very different from when I was growing up - it was all like, 'Stand by your man.'
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My writing has to support more than my research habit, but I love to curl up with a book about some dusty corner of history.
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This manner of writing wherein knowing myself inferior to myself? I have the use, as I may account it, but of my left hand.
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I was already writing about the idea of a 'multiverse' in the 1970s, though I might have called it the 'pluriverse.' How was I to know it would turn out to be the standard model? Actually, I consider myself an enlightenment fossil.
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I'm a very melody-driven writer and I have a rule that I don't write anything down because if I can't remember the melody than it wasn't worth remembering. So it's my way to test myself in the studio. When I was a kid I could sing pretty well so melody always made a lot of sense to me.
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I had a writing professor at Brandeis who told me I'd never make it - and when I sold my first novel a few years later, I sent him a copy!
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When I teach writing, I have a mantra: 'Be a first-rate version of yourself, and not a second-rate version of another writer.'
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I could write all songs all day long about what I think about the music industry or music in general. Sometimes I gotta be like, "Let's write about something else." You don't want to say the same thing over and over again. In a lot of ways, I look at records as a year or two of my life encapsulated in songs. They're almost like journal entries.
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They ask me what I'm writing for - I'm writing to show you what we're fighting for.
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The thing that has always baffled me about people's perception of my writing is the sense that I'm a very controversial, opinionated, polarizing person. I feel like I write about things that I'm interested in, and I describe why they're interesting to me. I could be negative, I guess. It's far easier to write why something is terrible than why it's good.
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People like me write because otherwise we are pretty inarticulate. Our articulation is our writing.
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One of the lovely things about writing when nobody knows who you are is there's no expectation.
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Somebody said writing is easy, you just sit down at your typewriter and open a vein. It depends on the book. Some, I have to do quite a lot of research, which I like. Others are much closer to me.
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Writing is my therapy. My feelings build up inside of me and then I sit down and write a song.
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It's weird being an author because it's different than writing songs. You put so much more of yourself out there to be judged because it's a memoir. So when the reviews come in, they all feel really personal. Some people are just going to hate you no matter what. Personally, I never believe good reviews.
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I've certainly been someone who has loved to mine the trials and tribulations of growing up in general, and the people who are in our lives, and I don't mind pulling from them and writing things down on my phone that my family says.
