Writing Quotes
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Even when I was writing 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette,' I started to appreciate Seattle's many charms.
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If you are afraid to write or edit or assemble or disassemble, you are merely a spectator. And you are trapped, trapped by the instructions of those you've chosen to follow. Twenty people in the field and eighty thousand in the stands. The spectators are the ones who paid to watch, but it's the player on the field who are truly alive.
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Writing is a funny business. You sit in your room and listen to voices and write everything down. What kind of a profession is that?
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I think I am the most impressed with writing styles that defy category, like Kharms or Selby, Breton or Jarry, where you become as interested in the writer as much as the writing itself. It's all these things that make reading so appealing to me.
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Paintings must be understood through the eyes, and that's not the word either. No writing, no talking, no singing, no dancing will explain them. They are the final, the nth whoopee of sight.
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One thing that I believe is that every time I write something, I am taking the time to celebrate. Even if I am writing a sad story or an angry poem, I am still giving those stories my time and attention.
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I emphasize the dual mission of the Life Cube Project: involving as many members of the community as possible; and encouraging people to write down their goals, ambitions and wishes. I hope that the concept has an impact on these students' lives - that would be my dream.
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I don't sit down to write a song; they just come to me from something that somebody says, or something in the news. The punchline comes to me, and I go over it in my head and get the song form. I hadn't been doing that a lot.
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The great artist is the simplifier.
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When I'm writing in long hand, it just goes on and on and on. When I was in the saloon business, I would just greet people and talk to them and avoid taxes, and getting behind the bar. What else.
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All our songs are about real people, true events. We do write about DC Comics and things like The Replacements. It's pretty much good conversations that happen at Art Brut shows. It's like making friends - like a Wanted ad: "Man that likes the Replacements and DC Comics wants friends to drink with at venue tonight. Who's coming?" It's like that.
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Writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done.
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I take editing seriously. It's a joy to edit. I always hand a manuscript to several editors and can't wait to get back their notes and see what they've said. I don't criticize myself for making blunders here and there, because it's just natural. You write in chunks, and you may not remember that that sentence you wrote yesterday had the same word repeated three times. I do enjoy that. I love the feeling of repairing. Repairing is really nice.
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I don't separate writing songs from poetry and short fiction. In the area where I work in my house, there's a word processor and a guitar.
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It took me nine months to write 60 pages. It was very frustrating
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I used to try to write a song a day. I've been so busy lately.
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I love writing for and about women. In my whole career I have.
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With my students I give them lots and lots of guided writing. Part of it is as simple as writing a lot but not toward anything. The mind floats. Then I help them see where the language has heat. If we do this a lot in class, students eventually relax into this writing practice and enjoy it. Even just that - writing pleasure without the anxiety of "audience" or "grade" or "success" - is a kind of impetus toward the unfamiliar.
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I always thought it would be funny to have the Parents Television Council write an episode of 'Family Guy' and give them full creative control. Then see how good the episode is. That's something we've actually discussed in the writers' room. We haven't proposed it yet, but if somebody from the PTC reads this, it might be worth discussing.
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When I need to work up my nerve to write a tough column, I try to think of myself as Emma Peel in a black leather catsuit.
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I keep writing books about why TV is good. There's nothing more fun to me than steering people toward something that I really loved that I think they might not otherwise see. That's the reason I do what I do.
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Songwriting never gets old. There's always stuff to write about.
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I refuse to censor myself and kids will find their own way to my books and to all of the books that matter to them. As I write more honestly more kids will make their way toward me. And in subverting their repressive parents kids will learn the value of subverting the repressive nature of all authority figures.
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I stopped writing short fiction early on - I was never really good at it, and I never liked the results. So I stopped trying to fit the material I was working with into these tidy little short fiction packages.
