Writing Quotes
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When I'm writing a story, I try to reduce it to the barest possible components and go from there.
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Writing used to be my hobby, but now that it's my job, I have no hobby - except watching TV and laying around the pool reading 'U.S. Weekly.' I have tried many hobbies, such as knitting, Pilates, ballet, yoga, and guitar, but none of them have taken.
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What I always wanted to get seen as was as a good actor, when it was the acting I was doing. When I'm writing, I want to try to be seen as a good writer.
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My favourite part of writing a book is thinking up the ideas, and that can start a long time before I actually sit down at my desk.
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So much of writing is done alone in a room in sweatpants, with only the Internet for company.
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I like writing about what to me are like questions that I have about myself and the human condition. I find quantum physics fascinating, so I like to write about that, and I like things that make me laugh.
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The first thing you have to do is get immersed in the project, organizing yourself, knowing what you are going after and not going after. It is extremely important to know what you don't want to find. Research to me is as important or more important than the writing. It is the foundation upon which the book is built.
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I find historical figures in general very tricky because you feel at times that you're serving two masters. Not only the arc and wonderful writing that comes with the show, but also the history of a person's life.
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I always wanted to write. While I was on a long surf trip, supporting myself with various day jobs, I was working hard on a novel. My third novel, in fact.
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I don't really get into a writing routine until March or April, when I'll write a few hundred words a day, often in a cafe in the morning after the school run.
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Some people don't have a way of that catharsis and I do, so I'm lucky in that sense that people listen to my songs and enjoy my songs. It's a really important thing for me, it's how I channel everything. I don't really know what I'd do if I didn't write songs.
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Comedy writing is the hardest, and yet there's so much that's relatable in it.
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Your life informs your writing.
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As I was writing, I realised I wasn't sufficiently extrovert to gather enough interesting souls with tall tales around me. I was no Louis Theroux. But neither was I interested in exploring my inner life in public, in the manner of a Jonathan Raban.
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The press keep asking me, 'What was your biggest mistake?' But if I had made a big mistake, they'd all be writing about it, wouldn't they?
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A lot of [George Saunders] early stories now feel prophetic. Take the recent election [of Donald Trump]. Historians in 100 years might write about it as being the first internet election, in which what happened was actually an expression in the real world of a virtual reality. And you've been writing about that subject for a while.
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Instead of announcing what you are about to tell is interesting, make it so.
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When I came into consciousness as a writer when I was in my early 20s, I just assumed that a writer did - a poet writer did everything all at once. I would write poetry, and while writing poetry I would also write work in the world - if I could get into the world.
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There are instances where lines in my work are borrowed or stolen from sources, mainly from books, or they become my own versions. A lot of the writing is my own, too. But if someone were to take each drawing and trace it back to its source, most of them could be traced back to a book or a text.
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I've gotten very alert not just to mixed metaphor but to any writing mistake.
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I suppose, the natural outgrowth about writing about two friends, it becomes about their friendship, and the complexities of it, and the way personality plays off each other, and what they each like to do, separately and together.
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Well, language seems to be something that obsesses me. I'm always writing about it.
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Music - which I could never listen to while writing before I had children - became essential to my process.
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It varies from song to song, although Buck Owens and I recently collaborated on writing a duet together and am looking forward with a great deal of anticipation to recording that track for the new studio album.
