Writing Quotes
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I’ll get a glimmer of an idea and the rest is just chipping away. It’s a long process, and most of my music undergoes many changes over the weeks or months that I’m writing. The songs change during touring, too, but the recording process always comes first.
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And of course, in my writing, there is the constant theme of music, love of, preoccupation with, music. Music is the single thread making my life into a coherency. … It's my job and my vice mixed together. You can't hope for better than that: having your job and your sin commingled.
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When I'm old I shall give up writing the big stuff and shall wander round the park thinking of songs.
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If you write a story based on a real person, you're trapped by the details of the real person and his life. It gets in the way of writing your own story.
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Whenever I write for hotel reservations, I always enclose a set of rules I have made for the hotels.
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I get melancholy if I don't [write]. I need the company of people who don't exist.
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I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.
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I always find out after the fact that the books I've been writing were actually some sort of therapy, some sort of, you know, self-examination that I had to write the book in order to complete.
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I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.
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If you could have a famous writer, dead or alive, write an obituary for you and really puff you up to have been something you weren’t, perhaps, or otherwise take liberties with your memory, what writer would you choose?
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I tend to like writing long stories in comics. I worked on 'Flash,' 'Teen Titans' and 'JSA' for years. I always like diving into characters.
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What a thrill it is to have my writing recognized by an institution as admirable and vital as the National Endowment for the Arts.
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I had a job writing in a weekly newspaper but after a while that got boring because I realized the people I was interviewing were far less interesting than me and I didn't see why I should be talking to them.
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Stop thinking about writing as art. Think of it as work. If you’re an artist, whatever you do is going to be art. If you’re not an artist, at least you can do a good day’s work.
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I didn't think of myself as writing 'cli-fi,' but I'll take the label. I'll take any label that makes someone think they might be interested in my stories.
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A brighter future is ours to write. Let’s begin this new chapter — together — and let’s start the work right now.
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I love writing letters. In order to write a novel in first person, I think I needed an addressee.
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But I can't and don't ever want to write bell-yanking confetti-tossing hat-throwing poems.
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I don't want to write things that people don't want to read. I would have no pleasure in producing something that sold 600 copies but that was considered very wonderful. I would prefer to sell 20,000 copies because the readers loved it. When I write books I don't actually think about the market in that way. I just tell myself the story. I don't think I'm talking to a 10-year-old boy or a six-year-old girl. I just write on the level the story seems to call for.
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'Despacito' started with a melody hook that I had with my guitar only. The beat for this track came after I wrote the lyrics, which I wrote as if I was writing a ballad.
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It's much easier to teach writing, because people are less shy about writing. If they're in a group, nobody can see what they're writing. When you're drawing, people get a little more nervous.
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I think most fiction writers naturally start by writing short stories, but some of us don't. When I first started writing, I just started writing a novel. It's a hard way to learn to write. I don't recommend it to my students, but it just happens that way for some of us.
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My writing is different. I think it's better. I think it's deeper. But, strangely enough, it covers a lot of the old ground. Maybe it says it in a more sophisticated way ... but I [have written] about basically the same subjects over the years.
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I have no interest in writing, generally speaking, about America at all - even if it does continue to terrify me.
