Writing Quotes
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I started writing seriously when I was a teenager, around 14 years old.
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To me, truth is the big thing. Constantly you're writing something and you get to a place where your characters could go this way or that and I just can't lie. The characters have gotta be true to themselves.
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Well we never set out to write a concept album. I've always used song writing as a therapeutic release so in that process, I just do my best to be honest with myself and look inside myself and whatever comes out usually just reflects or depicts what I'm going through in my life at that time.
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When I first started out writing the 'Darkness' books, there was, at least in my mind, a certain sort of rulebook we had to follow.
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Poetry was my dirty little secret when I was a fiction writer at Iowa, and then fiction became my dirty little secret when I started writing more poetry and working for 'Rookie'.
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More and more, you're seeing television shows that are better than 99% of the movies out there. I mean, you watch something like the last couple of seasons of 'The Sopranos,' which is some of the most sophisticated writing I've ever seen filmed and some of the best filmmaking I've ever seen - and it's a TV show.
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I do outlines when I'm writing with someone, but they also need to have a certain amount of freedom.
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I think, as writers, our first responsibility is to writing an honest story. Tell the story you want to tell, without pulling your punches.
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I'd like to know what I could do if I really had the time to spend on writing a book, with no columns or shows to do at the same time.
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I think all writing is an attempt to complicate and subvert the dominant narrative. Writing personalizes statistics. It puts a face and a name on a number. I suppose in that sense it's always political.
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You can write a great book and be ignored. Literary history is full of classics that were under-appreciated in their own time.
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Writing a story starts out as a puzzle in your mind, of "What is it I'm fantasizing about right now that makes me think this is going to be worth years of work?" And you just keep pushing and trying to figure it out, and once you've hit on these resonances... Then as a screenwriter, it can be dangerous if you get too hooked on just finding things that resonate with each other, because then you risk getting into stuff that's too neat, and becomes stifled as storytelling. But you do feel like you're on the right track when you start to have a sense of what goes with what.
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Some writing and production projects will be a great way to spend my elderly rock years.
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I left things out - my motivations, my history, my emotional responses - because I am not good at understanding them or writing about them. I tried and it was generally boring and always unconvincing. Most importantly I wanted to try to place Afghans and Afghanistan in the foreground rather than my own character.
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From the writer's point of view, critics should be ignored, although it's hard not to do what they suggest. I think it's unfortunate to have critics for friends. Suppose you write something that stinks, what are they going to say in a review? Say it stinks? So if they're honest, they do, and if you were friends you're still friends, but the knowledge of your lousy writing and their articulate admission of it will be always something between the two of you, like the knowledge between a man and his wife of some shady adultery.
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If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.
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It didn't happen in the 70s. So I had a whole decade when I was writing these books and maybe there was a little bit here or there but there was no big effort to ban books.
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Seize every opportunity you have to learn. Keep your eyes and ears wide open and seize life — don't let the moments slip through your fingers like a fistful of sand. Be your own teacher. Let life write your textbook.
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Sometimes we'll walk into a set, and I'll think, 'Oh, this film doesn't look like this.' You know, 'cause I read the script, and I saw it in my head in some other way. Which is a lot like what happens when they're writing a movie that's based on a book - I'm like, 'Ah! He doesn't have a beard.' You have these visions in your head about it.
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Often in writing programs, articulation and clarity are more important than what you actually say.
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The best compliment I get every year is that a band will write me and say, 'We were just on tour, and we had people coming to our show saying they had never heard us before they heard us on your show.'
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What inspires me is anxiety and the quest to try to change things in my life. ...I got addicted to endings and beginnings and to the idea of always moving around. ...Obviously, whenever you're going through something that's the best time to create, if you're going through something amazing, or horrible, or nothing at all you should be creating. Unfortunately the songwriters of today generally torture themselves to make sure they're writing good songs and take it a little too seriously.
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When I met Judd Apatow, he told me I should start writing screenplays. They'd be really bad at first, but the more I did it, the better I'd get.
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You write for the people in high school who ignored you. We all do.
