Writing Quotes
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I'd studied 16th century science and magic. I thought it was strange that people were interested in the same kinds of things my research was about. The more I thought about it, the more intriguing it became and pretty soon I was writing a novel about a reluctant witch and a 1500-year-old vampire.
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My work is more driven by the creative word. It's immersed in other writing and printed work, rather than drawn so much from life or past experience.
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We had offers to go everywhere and we could have done them. But what would have been the point? We were tired. We had worked hard and needed a break before we got stale. We spent six months at home and writing songs.
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I always was intrigued with writing my own stuff, and I was always really bad at learning other people's stuff.
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I guess that in a lot of ways, my writing is more of a character to me than something that I feel personally attached to.
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The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.
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When writing on black life, whites have often been unwelcome, usually called upon to give witness or hauled in as the accused.
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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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The 'sent' folder of my email program is really my biggest inspiration and my biggest source of lyrics. That's where I go to pick up a lot of the lyrics that I'm writing.
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Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.
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I don't need anyone to write me a show in my style, I would like to do a show in a style that wasn't my style, because that's the only way I can grow up and grow out.
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We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.
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Fantasy flows in where fact leaves a vacuum.
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What makes my work my own is where I'm writing from. And I feel like I have a million stories to write about Chicago.
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Writing doesn't come easily to me. It gets more and more difficult.
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The writing day can be, in some ways, too short, but it's actually a long series of hours, for months at a time, and there is a stillness there.
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I tend to like to write a song and then think about it for a while. I record a demo of it and then put it away and wait until I've gotten more thoughts on it or get sure exactly how to approach it.
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Each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all.
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The way I sometimes approach my work, when I look at a script for the first time, is to identify what the archetypes are and what the writing is trying to do in that context.
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I think that poetry is an act of celebration, that anytime you're writing a poem, it means that you're celebrating something, even if it's a sad poem, if it's an angry poem, a political poem or anything at all. The fact that you're taking the time and energy to pick up this thing and hold it to the light, and say, "Let's take some time to consider this," means that you've deemed it worthy enough to spend time on - which, in my opinion, is celebrating.
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I did have a child, and I was reading a lot of picture books to her, but at the same time writing a children's book was something that I'd been wanting to do for many years, pretty much since the start of my career.
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It takes me three months of research and nine months of work to produce a book. When I start writing, I do two pages a day; if I'm gonna do 320, that's 160 days.
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I actually love writing for teens best. I had such an awful time in my own teen years - I love having the chance to relive them through my fiction.
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For me, the challenge is just making great albums, because talent - and writing in general - is not tangible. There's no expiration date on it. At the same time, you might wake up tomorrow and be unable to write music.
