Writing Quotes
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You have to keep challenging yourself. I've always tried to do that, and I'm not saying I've always been successful. Maybe I've rewritten the same song; it's inevitable, but I've always been mindful of taking the writing somewhere else. You can't stick in your little comfort zone.
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To me, music shouldn't be ego-driven. When you go out on stage and play songs, it is. But when you're sitting in a room, writing songs, it's a completely different process. It's a completely different place. It's a creative place, a musical place. It has nothing to do with who likes what.
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When I was 12, I was going through an awkward time. Writing music helped me find my voice and express the things I was feeling.
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I started writing and photographing for different publications and finally ended up being the correspondent in South Asia, for the Geneva-based Journal de Geneve, which at one time used to be one of the best international newspapers in Europe.
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You know, I can't imagine 9 to 5 writing. That takes some stamina.
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Love is the main generator of all good writing... Love, passion, compassion, are all welded together.
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The hardest thing about writing a script is you finish it, but it doesn't mean anything. It's not like a novel or short story - a script is meant to be made into a movie.
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I just have to proceed as usual. No matter what happens, nothing helps with the writing of the next book.
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One of the pleasures of writing novels is that my characters usually do something. But in real life we often stay locked in a situation that we know is painful or wrong.
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The characters are always the focal point of a book for me, whether I'm writing or reading. I may enjoy a book that has an intriguing mystery or a good plot, but to become one of my real favorites, it has to have great characters.
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There are no rules to writing a song.
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I usually start writing a novel that I then abandon. When I say abandon, I don't think any writer ever abandons anything that they regard as even a half-good sentence. So you recycle. I mean, I can hang on to a sentence for several years and then put it into a book that's completely different from the one it started in.
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The great thing about writing is that it has to work without that invisible layer of the reader's added knowledge.
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I think, no matter what, when you're writing songs, most people write about the extremes of their experiences.
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I love acting but I also love writing, especially comedy.
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Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.
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Good writers know that crime is an entre into telling a greater story about character. Good crime writing holds up a mirror to the readers and reflects in a darker light the world in which they live.
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Prose is like this big block - you write big paragraphs. I feel that when I'm reading and writing, that a prose book is kind of monolithic. But a song is more like a feather or something.
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Writing is, by its nature, interior work. So being forced to be around people is a great gift for a novelist. You get to be reminded, daily, of how people think, how they speak, how they live; the things they worry about, the things they hope for, the things they fear.
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The thing that makes writing so difficult is you don't have the element of serendipity. At least with a photograph, you can set up the camera, and something might happen. You might be a lousy photographer, but you can get a good picture if you just take enough of them.
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It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.
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Usually I decide on what it is I'm writing next by the books I'm reading.
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The way Jacques Brel writes a story, getting into the character, bringing out all his faults and qualities in the same song.... Not that I could ever write in such an epic way, but it really is a different way to go about writing lyrics...and I find that quite inspiring.
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There is no such thing as Christian art or secular art - writing, painting, drawing, whatever it is.
