Writing Quotes
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I'd much rather do an obviously commercial writing project than get a day job.
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I love writing, but I have that E. E. Cummings idea that as long as you stay inside the rules of your own world, it doesn't matter what it is.
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O'Casey was writing about people in the streets and his mother and dying babies and poverty. So that astounded me because I thought you could only write about English matters.
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When I wrote 'Dear Fatty,' I realised that sitting and writing alone is an absolute joy.
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I had to write a comedy set and film a show at the same time. And it's the second time I've been up on stage as a stand-up comedian with untested material. I was saying it out loud for the first time that night. It didn't go how I expected, but in the best possible way.
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I always saw songwriting as the top of the heap. No matter what else you were going to do creatively - and there were a lot of choices - writing songs was king.
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When I was 20, I wrote a film on spec and sent it to the BBC. They wrote back, 'Usually, when we reject submissions, we like to offer some encouragement, but in your case, we don't see any point in you continuing.' I took it as encouragement anyway, thinking that only people who write terrible things are capable of writing great things.
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When in many dissections, carried out as opportunity offered upon living animals, I first addressed my mind to seeing how I could discover the function and offices of the heart's movement in animals through the use of my own eyes instead of through the books and writings of others, I kept finding the matter so truly hard and beset with difficulties that I all but thought, with Fracastoro, that the heart's movement had been understood by God alone.
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It's so tedious writing cookbooks or writing the recipes because I've never been much of a measurer. But to write a book, you have to measure everything.
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I was thinking about doing another film at the same time, which was the sequel to Basic Instinct and I just had a feeling that wasn't going to happen. You know, I just kind of read the writing on the wall.
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There's a lot of sub-conscious stuff you may write but you don't then suddenly sit down and take out your analytical books and say: I'm determined to find out where this came from. You'd probably be wrong anyway.
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At the time I was writing 'Weedflower,' my friend Naomi Hirahara was writing a book about Japanese-American flower farmers. She knew quite a few elderly farmers and put me in touch with four or five of them who had been in camps during WWII. Some, like my father, were reluctant to talk about their experiences.
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Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.
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Writing is a intensely personal activity. I can pen down my best thoughts when I'm alone. But when one is elevated into the stature of an author, you have to think about your books in terms of their business angle.
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I thought if I really wanted to be serious about writing, I should make my own desk.
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Seriously, my music really does help my acting, and, like, getting in and out of a character from a different lifestyle and writing a song about it. Likewise, my acting inspires the music because I can write a theme that I wouldn't necessarily approach at all in life.
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Writing a screenplay is daunting for sure, but I think that Hollywood needs them, so if you can manage to do that, there's certainly a value within it.
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Yeah, I have the detail-obsessed, controlling personality of a novelist, but I somehow ended up writing plays.
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Every artist wants an audience, and it's incredible to me how books take on a life of their own and reach people whom you could never meet. That's what got me interested in writing in the first place.
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Writing novels is where I'm most comfortable. It's a very intimate experience.
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I write just knowing that I enjoy writing. But if I have to write, it seems like nothing comes. But when I go there for my own pleasure, the Lord might just give me loads of stuff all at once.
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I tell people not to write too soon about their lives. Writing about yourself too young is loaded with psychological complexities.
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I can't write a novel without first really doing reporting. I don't even call it research; it's reporting. That process is very important to the granularity of my writing. I have to know what the reality is so I can be more convincing in the writing.
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I've worked on other shows where the sense is like, "Well, don't change it too much," you know? But on this one [ Too Much Tuna], Nick [Kroll] and John [Mulaney] - beyond being amazing performers - are also writers, and wanted to keep improving upon the show, particularly the play within a play. I think the writing just got funnier and funnier.
