Writing Quotes
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By the time I wrote those first three songs for his new CD ... I wanted to push the poetics as hard as I could push them, and not decide the songs were finished until I committed them to whatever the recording format was. I went through drafts right up until I recorded every single one of them.
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With showrunning, the more successful you get, the more you're pulled away from the writing.
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And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.
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I love doing the research for the novels. For me, the writing is hard work.
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I didn't look at it as a transition so much, because I never intended to have a career as a journalist, writing about people who make movies.
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Writing is very much like bricklaying. You learn to put one brick on top of another and spread the mortar so thick.
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[On writing to Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple:] I told her I would play a Venetian blind, dirt on the floor, anything.
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In writing the autobiography, I can really chuckle when I look at the songs. I was acting out the part. I saw myself as a victim.
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Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.
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I have always used emotion as a writing tool. That goes back to me being on the stage.
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Dreamt I died in Chicago next weekend (heart attack in my sleep). Need to write my will today.
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Instead of saying, ‘The writing in this scene isn’t good enough,’ you say, ‘Don’t you want people to walk out of the theater and be quoting those lines?’ It’s more of a challenge.
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I had always been more interested in playing and improvising than sitting down at a desk and writing out a piece. I'd always found it more fun to play, and the other a little bit tedious. I always had trouble with the decisions.
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Never having thought of writing for the guitar, I asked Julian Bream for a chart which would explain what the guitar could do. I managed to write some rather pretty pieces for him, except that the first six notes of the first piece all need to be played on open strings. So when he begins to play the audience will probably think he's tuning the bloody thing up!
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Theatre can entertain, provoke, challenge, investigate, comfort and educate. It's arrogant of a playwright to think education is more important than anything else. Writing for the theatre does not give you permission to lecture, hector or bore.
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Writing fiction has always, for me, been an alchemy of turning pain into poetry, ugliness into beauty. It has been a kind of redemption.
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Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.
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I realized all the writing I love lives in the gray area.
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Series television is kind of intensive in terms of time. You fall hard for TV writing, but it's almost love-hate. You're under pressure all the time, but that pressure gets interesting things out of you that are, you know, mysterious.
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[To write poems] I think it's important to do research, and research mostly is going to come from books, so all of your reading is potentially helpful to your poetry.
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If you're still wondering about details - how am I going to get these two to meet, or whatever - when you're writing, you can't pay proper attention to the sentences themselves.
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Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.
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If you're writing a thriller, and you don't make it compelling, then you've really not done your job. So it's easier for me not to set out with certain goals, and then I can't see them as unmet. It's like life generally: If I'm not aiming to be physically fit, then I'm not always thinking about being unfit.
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Writing for yourself is like exposing your diary. It can be a little embarrassing at times, but if it helps somebody get through the day just by hearing a song, it's well worth it.
