Writing Quotes
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I consider myself a writer who writes about American expatriates. And if I have any overt cause as a writer besides writing the best prose I can, it's to try to make Americans have a more visceral feeling about how America impacts everybody in the world.
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I had started writing as a poet in a closed, post-Revival, claustrophobic world, where the shadows of the national upheaval and the intense effort - the intense self-conscious effort - to make a literary movement were still evident. Now we lived a life as writers that was more cosmopolitan, more open, that had more travel and exchange.
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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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To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I'm writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I'm going to play for the opening sequence.
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Opera tells stories through the pure emotion of music. An exhibition has to tell a story purely visually. I've tried to incorporate both of those things - pure emotion and being more visual - into my writing.
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I used to like writing for comedians - I enjoyed the challenge of making other people funny.
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I didn't take writing seriously at first - I didn't think I could do it. When I did, I fell in love with it. But writing is very lonely.
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Most of 'All Hail West Texas' was written during orientation at a new job I had. I had basically worked this job before, I knew this stuff, so I was writing lyrics in the margins of all the Xeroxed material.
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I'm still an old-school reporter at heart. Writing fiction satisfies my journalistic need to hear and relay the testimony of everyday people at the center of events.
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I love film and have taken a stab at a screenplay. I love writing dialogue and found it highly enjoyable.
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If I am writing a movie and I am stuck, I can call the studio and tell them it's delayed. You can't do that with television - you have air dates to meet.
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I love writing romance, along with science fiction and fantasy - and my books usually meld all three to some degree.
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I start writing with only the vaguest idea about who my characters are and what is going to happen, and the characters and plot come into existence as I go. I've tried doing it the other way, but for me, outlining is a waste of time because I never follow the outline.
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Writing for children is an art in itself, and a most interesting one.
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I feel like I know how to write plot.
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I don't think I'd ever make an album of just covers because I love writing my own music.
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For me personally, I'm always writing from what's happening in my emotional life. Even without thinking about it a lot of the time, it comes out in the songs that I'm writing.
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There's nothing mathematical to my writing. It's a feeling.
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I often feel like not writing! Sometimes I overcome it by just sitting there until writing happens. Sometimes I don't write, because books often need periods of percolation.
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By the age of nine or ten, I knew that I loved history and writing. It got hold of me and never turned loose.
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I started writing plays in around 1967, and at a certain point, I thought, 'I'm writing plays, I should learn about acting and what it is.' So I went to the HB Studio in New York, and I was there for about nine months.
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I think visually... so, even when I'm writing a play, I'm envisioning it.
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When I'm writing songs, my favourite thing to do is to try and rabbit-trail and go places I've never gone to before. Just like exploring a new terrain or a new country or something.
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When I write a novel, every word is mine. I welcome suggestions from my editor, but in the end, I make all the final decisions.
