Writing Quotes
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There's a lot of writing in television that can sound like it's taken out of a package, and the way to get around that is to not allow yourself to deliver it that way.
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I wrote 'Zeuglodon' on a whim. I found myself writing the voice of an 11-year-old girl. I don't know why.
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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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One of the lovely things about writing when nobody knows who you are is there's no expectation.
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I was so naive about writing, I went to the public library and checked out the only volume they had on the topic - an academic treatise about publishing from the WWII era.
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I think it's important to really press on with the song writing and just go with it. There's no code, there's no craft... it's just let yourself shine through your music. If it's meant to be loved and heard, it'll happen.
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As a high-school drop-out, I knew I wanted to write, but I wasn't overly confident that I was going to be writing anything serious. I was happy enough with the idea that I could be a penny-a-word guy and survive.
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Periods of inactivity, I don't know such things. I'm consistently writing. My life is busy. It always is. There are hardly any moments for self-indulgent laziness.
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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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There's no getting around it: Writing is hard, while working with young performers is nearly always a joy.
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When I wrote 'Silver Linings,' I thought I was writing a book about the Philadelphia Eagles and male bonding, but when the book came out, it was surprising to me that the mental health community embraced it.
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I've got splinters in my nose from the best publishing doors in town.
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The whole point of writing is to have something in your gut or in your soul or in your mind that's burning to be written.
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Every time I finish a book, I forget everything I learned writing it - the information just disappears out of my head.
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You lose somebody you've possibly known for years and on top of that you lose a character that you love seeing on TV so I think that kind of makes it cool that we pay a price too. That it is painful on many levels and its amazing to be writing that moment and crossing that line right on the page and seeing the ugliness of it and having to deal with it. It's a very weird thing.
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I didn't go into journalism thinking it would solidify my identity. I did it because I needed to make a living, and I was proficient in writing. But in becoming a journalist, I learned about other people who felt like they were on the edges of American mainstream life.
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Action is my first love. When I first started writing, my favorite movies were 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' and 'Aliens', and that sort of thing.
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I wrote the Dickens book because I loved Dickens, not because I felt a kinship with him, but after writing the book it seemed to me that there was at least one similarity between us and that was that Dickens loved to write and wrote with the ease and conviction of breathing. Me, too.
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When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader.
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The movies that work are the ones in which somebody very smart figured out how to take all the thematic material, all the character material, all the filigree, all the beautiful writing, and put it into a story.
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I'm so sick of the brainless overpraise of post-structuralist drivel. Michel's oafishly pretentious and phony to boot. I liked him for defending pedophilia, but his writing style is dense and irrational. And that forced Parisian accent that he no longer has in real life because of all the time he's been spending in San Fran bath-houses - ugh!
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It's strange: I've done so many things up until I did 'Obvious Child,' including writing children's books and making 'Marcel the Shell.' To me, the through-line is incredibly clear: it all comes from wanting to be connected to my own inner voice and not wanting to be on somebody else's agenda if that means that I can't be myself.
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I sort of kept my hand in writing and went to work for the Sierra Club in '52, walked the plank there in '69, founded Friends of the Earth and the League of Conservation Voters after that.
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When I wrote 'The Girl on the Train,' nobody knew who I was, and that's quite a comfortable position to be writing in.
