Writing Quotes
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I like to sit down every day and not know where the book is going. I have no idea where the book is going to go or how it's going to end as I'm writing it.
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I didn't have any writer friends in college. I was a computer science major, but I was writing a lot, probably more than anybody I knew. I started to submit novels to New York when I was a freshman in college.
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All the time I was writing hit songs with my partner David Porter, I always had the yen to perform. Sure did. And when the opportunity came, I took it. The first album, 'Presenting Isaac Hayes,' didn't do so hot, but it was like a prelude for what was to come.
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The fact that I'm shouting that I have Gangnam style makes people crack up. Imagine if Brad Pitt was singing the song - would it be funny? A twist is important when it comes to writing lyrics.
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It's so great in Hollywood now. You have people past 40 sitting and talking about serious stuff, writing and making movies and TV, but there's laser pistols and superheroes and alien monsters involved. It's viable and mainstream.
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Complex tasks are often better handled in the back of our mind, and that's often true of creative tasks - when you have something complex to deal with in writing or research or responding to an email. I'll start working, put it aside, and sometimes I'll wake up the next morning with a solution, or I'll find one when I exercise.
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I loved the writing process. I loved it.
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Living composers writing for big band are very few and far between. There are not a lot of them, and I have a talent for doing it. I am zeroing in on what I do best.
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You go from these high hopes when you're writing to just a desperate want of not making a complete fool of yourself by the end of it.
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When I started writing about art, there were no curators.
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The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud.
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I'm not one of those people who's so blinded by my own work and my sweat. It's kind of risky writing a memoir when you're really part of a larger universe.
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If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.
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My song-writing has always been just about my life - usually my worst moments.
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At one point, I was greenlighting films and scripts that shouldn't have been made based on the fact that they had that stamp of approval of an Academy Award winner. And the good news is I got to learn the real process of filmmaking - directing, storyboarding, writing.
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I am now writing a book called 'Far Enough,' very loosely based on my childhood. This is difficult because it forces me to remember people I loved who are gone.
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'Monstress' has been hard because I want to keep writing longer, but I can't.
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Silk Road to Ruin has all the analysis and it's structured very well. I rely on my notes more and I use direct quotes. But there's nothing like writing about it right away.
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Everyone thinks when they start writing that they can't do it. I was lucky. My sister Delia was the most important person in terms of encouraging me.
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We started out a long time ago, and we've managed to just keep writing current songs and have No. 1 current records.
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'The L-Word' was such a great show because of the amazing writing and characters, but maybe because it was such a new concept, people couldn't pick up on it, but I think it was down to the dynamic characters and how well done it was.
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In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.
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Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.
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When we first started playing in the early days, none of us really had any idea about writing our own songs yet. We were struggling how to learn our instruments and play songs to be able to perform for people.
