Writing Quotes
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I have found, writing a blog, that being non-opaque is necessary. You pretty much have to say what you know in much more firm terms or risk that the legions who always know more than you do will tell the story better.
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As much as I thought the end of 'Friday Night Lights' was a really great ending, I was one of those people who wanted to make it into a movie. Even though it ultimately didn't work to do that movie, I did work with some of the other writers and by myself writing a script for that.
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The publishers, as I remember at the very beginning of my career, wrote letters with their fountain pens. A letter is different from a phone call or fax. It's a different kind of intimacy. That pervaded the entire business of writing and publishing.
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I write from my knowledge not my lack, from my strength not my weakness. I am not interested if anyone knows whether or not I am familiar with big words, I am interested in trying to render big ideas in a simple way. I am interested in being understood not admired.
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I was an athlete, so I have kind of an athletic sensibility towards writing. I can work for many long hours without fatiguing.
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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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You don't realize how beautiful an idea is until you do it with other people. There's this really shimmery, awesome thing when you start finishing a song - where the song just starts writing itself.
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I think I'm in a really nice position, where I'm sure I could do another show if I wanted to do one, but right now the main thing in my mind is writing songs.
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It sounds funny, but I always try to keep an open mind about what I'm writing about. Sometimes I squeak my opinions in there, but generally I don't. I try to be objective about things that I'm writing about.
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Every major technological step forward has profoundly changed human society - that's how we know they're major, even if we don't always realise it at the time. Farming created cities. Writing, followed eventually by printing, vastly increased the preservation and transmission of cultural information across time and space.
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I hate writing about personal stuff. I don't have a Facebook page. I don't use my Twitter account. I am familiar with both, but I don't use them.
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I think it's harder than ever to be an artist. I think that you end up, especially as a middle-aged person, you pay such big consequences for saying, 'I'm just going to devote my life to making art,' or 'I'm going to devote my life to writing novels.' You end up with no resources.
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It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.
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I've been writing lullabies since the beginning. I kind of did it for myself to help myself fall asleep when I really worried, like when I was homeless and I'd fall asleep in my car.
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The morning is always my best time of the day for writing because that's when my head is best.
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I think writing is an extension of a childhood habit - the habit of entertaining oneself by taking interesting bits of reality and building upon them.
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I don't generate a storyline and then fill it out in the course of writing. The story actually generates in the course of the writing. It's one of the reasons I've never been comfortable doing screenplays, because in order to get the contract for the screenplay, you have to sit down and tell them what's going to happen.
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I want to be creative in as many different environments as possible, whether it's doing film scores, writing for TV ads or video games - all sorts of stuff, as long as it requires writing music.
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I've always been a writer. I've always done writing or spoken-word, hip-hop stuff with my friends.
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Instead of writing songs for girls, I tend to write albums, which I guess is a bit weird.
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I started a novel back in high school. It wasn't very good. It was the opposite of good. The writing itself wasn't too bad, and the characters were interesting. But the story was a mess, and it was full of fantasy cliches. Dwarf with an axe. Barbarian warrior. I don't ever think I'd bother finishing that. It's just not worth my time.
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I started playing video games, and in 1978 I discovered Dungeons & Dragons and started game-mastering and writing my own adventures and creating my own worlds.
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Weary of wily politicians who say one thing and do another, voters and advocacy groups insist presidential contenders commit to the cause du jour in writing, but candidates are foolish to comply. Words matter.
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I just can't fathom tweeting, and I'd rather spend my time writing a book than a blog, but I rather grudgingly agreed to a Facebook page. I had a brief, intense romance with Facebook. It's weirdly addictive, but anything that time-sucking is a danger for a writer who writes as slowly as I do. Now I post only occasionally and nothing very confessional. I think I'm carbon dating myself as I speak.
