Writing Quotes
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'Hound Dog' took like twelve minutes. That's not a complicated piece of work. But the rhyme scheme was difficult. Also the metric structure of the music was not easy. 'Kansas City' was maybe eight minutes, if that. Writing the early blues was spontaneous. You can hear the energy in the work.
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No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered.
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Writing is busy idleness.
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I try to make statements that aren't broad because that doesn't make for good writing. I don't get commentary as my job, because I'm not very good at that. The way I do it is by writing songs, and I have to be small; I have to make the stories a bit personal.
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All great writers are schizophrenics, you know what I'm saying? 'Cause they switch up. They become the person when they write.
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When I was writing stories about Chinese American characters in my fiction classes, I'd get comments like, 'You should consider writing more universal stories.' But anything can happen to a Chinese American girl - just as much of the canon of English literature involves white men or women.
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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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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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It's about a young man who has climbed to fame and he discovers that his writing and the relationship with his wife are really more important for him than anything else.
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When you write about animals, of course, you are really writing about the people who love and live with them. Animals mirror and reveal us. Dogs in particular are often reflections of us, and what we need them to be.
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I know that the writers I read and admire all have an influence on my work, but trying to determine to what degree any particular piece of input changes the way I think about writing seems counterproductive.
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Dad thought something very fishy was going on when, at 22, I was offered a job for £1,000 a year - more than Dad paid his own staff - for inventing cheese recipes and writing leaflets at the Dutch Dairy Bureau in London.
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When I was 22 years old, I thought girls would like me if I wrote a novel. I spent so much time writing that I was thrown out of graduate school.
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I've had trouble being in relationships and writing. This has been a real problem for me. I don't know if it's because I'm not free to fantasize or create these fantasy things about other people.
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I'm a fairly ordinary person - a lifelong reader, a former software engineer, and former math teacher. I come from a wonderful family of teachers, musicians, librarians, and engineers. I think I surprised them as well as my friends and coworkers when I took up writing as a hobby and let it take over my life!
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Comedy writing is the hardest, and yet there's so much that's relatable in it.
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Many fantasy novels - 'Lord of the Rings', for instance, or 'Lavondyss' by Robert Holdstock - are beautifully written. Geoff Ryman's 'The Child Garden' is exquisite and utterly beguiling. Mervyn Peake's 'Gormenghast' trilogy is an astonishing piece of multi-faceted storytelling. So quality of writing does not condemn the genre.
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College was a wonderful time to really explore my interests. I ended up writing my senior thesis about gender inequality in the developing world.
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One of the great moments of my life was when I could write musician on my passport.
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My overnight success was really 15 years in the making. I'd been writing songs since I was 6 and playing in bands and performing since I was 14.
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I've had to really teach myself that when you're not feeling it, you shouldn't write anything down because you're going to end up coming back and re-writing it later. Whereas, if you write when you're feeling something, when you're really in the streak, then that's when you're going to get your best stuff.
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I often find myself writing about people taking care of each other, or trying to.
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When I did start writing books, I didn't realize it, but the girls that grew up watching the show became moms.
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There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.
