Writing Quotes
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I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it up because sometimes it's almost illegible, and if I wait, I might not be able to read it the next day.
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Sometimes I write it down, sometimes I freestyle. I get lines coming to me randomly throughout the day and I'll jot it down and build on that. If I get a line that's about love, it starts up a whole love verse... And if a beat speaks to me, it's like I already know what to write.
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Writing a first draft is like trying to build a house in a strong wind.
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I know that when I'm writing, I always want to be directing.
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Writing is a passion and when things happen in my life, I write a lot. It’s a form of therapy.
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I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story.
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It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power.
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When you're on a staff, it's not your job to write what you think is funny. It's your job to write what the person who created the show thinks is funny.
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People don't really have a relationship with great writing or great production or great art direction or great direction. They just sort of admire it.
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I do that a lot of authors still do not do is allow people to write directly to me. I get about 50 fan letters a day, and I answer every single one of them myself. It takes a lot of time and sometimes it's a pain in the neck and I answer the same questions over and over. But the truth is these people come to my readings clutching these letters saying, "You wrote me back. I can't believe you wrote me back", and I think it really means a lot for them to know that the author values them just as much as they value the author.
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The problem with feminism in the second wave was that we fought so much among ourselves, and I think we did so much damage to the movement... and I think the next wave, the third wave, is women mentoring younger women and women helping younger women to enter the political process and the writing world.
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A piece of writing is like a piece of magic. You create something out of nothing.
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To justify an unorthodox life by writing about it is to re-inscribe the original violation, to re-violate masculine turf.
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I think writing is such a great talent, and if I was better I would love to be a writer.
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In the earlier days I did most of the song writing by myself, and I got to a place in my life where I felt it was necessary to go outside my box and get some outside inspiration.
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Write it as it is, don't try to make it like this or that. You can't do it in anybody else's way-you will have to make a way of your own.
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I can't do that wonderful thing that Tom Waits and Bob Dylan do - to do imagery. I'm not good at that. I just write from the heart.
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After many months of writing, it occured to me that it might be possible to photograph, in the flesh, what I was attempting to capture in words. I bought a Rolleiflex camera and began to take pictures of objects or structures that were used and abused by human hands
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I don't claim anything of the work. It is his work. I am like a little pencil in his hand. That is all. He does the thinking. He does the writing. The pencil has nothing to do with it.
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You'd hope that no writing about music could supersede the music itself. But I do think that blogs mirror the way that we are listening. It comes at you fast and it's timely and then five minutes later we're on to something else. It caters to our desire for instant gratification. And I think blogs also have fluidity that's exciting. You have a lot of real enthusiastic music fans for the most part that are writing sometimes for a large audience, and I think certain blogs have a little too much power over what someone likes or doesn't like.
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I knew I could only play Cyrano if he were Americanized. I had no intention of writing the script myself. I was afraid of it. You're playing with fire when you tamper with a classic. So I went looking for a writer. But it was such a personal idea, and anyone I would give it to would make it his own. It's hard to ask Neil Simon to write your idea.
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I always like it at a war. There is always the chance that you will get up the next morning and be killed and not have to write.
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But what I realized when I was looking back at them was that no matter how different they are, they're still coming from me, and they're still coming from my brain and my set of obsessions. I think that no matter how different I tried to make them, there were just these certain questions that I just kept circling back to as I was writing. I think they were the ones I was really swept up in in that decade.
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Writing anything is terribly hard but, alas for me, because I am addicted, a heck of a lot of fun. I often am sorry I ever started writing prose, because it is so hard. But I can't stop.
