Writing Quotes
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You have to be very brave in that first writing session.
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When I return to the writing process after being away from it for a while, the first part of it always is being honest with myself: What am I into right now? Is it rock bands and guitars, is it noise, is it dance beats and electronics? Is it space, is it clutter?
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Every single line on the Oscar show is negotiated. Unless you've been there, you have no idea how it is put together. It's like nothing else on earth. I'm writing a book about it, but I have to throw in my sexual escapades to make sure it sells.
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And after about two years, I realized that creative writing was not going to help you ace those biological tests. So I switched over to journalism. I didn't graduate with honors, but I did graduate on time and with some doing.
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I think in some ways, acting and writing are the same. You're getting inside the skin of someone else; you're creating their language and their actions. As a writer, you have to see the whole picture and the structure, and you have to understand every character.
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The entirety of 'Bellocq's Ophelia' was a project, and I was interested in doing research and looking at photographs and writing about them, imagining this woman Ophelia and what her life was like and the kinds of things she thought about.
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I love writing. I feel ridiculously lucky that this is what I get to do all day.
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When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.
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The hardest part about writing fiction is finding long stretches of time to do it: for me, this means writing mostly on Saturdays and Sundays. But I am always thinking about my characters, jotting down ideas in stolen moments and hoping I'll be able to make sense of them when the weekend rolls around.
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We're not one thing, as human beings, so any character that is written uni-dimensional, that's just a shallow character with shallow writing and shallow acting.
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I thought about being an actor, and I thought about directing, but writing truly became something I needed to do just to stay sane.
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Everybody's idea of a great book is different, of course. For me it's one that makes my jaw drop on every page, the writing is so original.
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Poetry is probably the one field of writing in which it is a mistake to try to psych out editors. In fact, specific marketing advice can sometimes harm the novice poet by enticing him to pursue fashions. The poet's best hope is to sound like nobody else, The finest, most enduring poetry constructs a marketplace of its own.
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In a way, I'm very interested in writing about Maine, because I think Maine represents its own kind of history. It's the oldest state, and it's the whitest state.
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I'm a better writer than I am a singer, and I express myself easily through writing.
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One constant writing ritual, no matter what I'm writing, is that I cannot write if people are around me. It wigs me out - the idea that someone is reading as I'm writing stuff.
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There are three things I look for in a story - it has to be a thriller; I cannot see myself writing literary fiction or a saga! There has to be a historical connection; otherwise, the adrenalin will not flow. And I will try to bridge the gap between 'Rozabal' and 'Chanakya'.
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I worry that people think you have to go to a university to be a good writer, which is categorically untrue. I don't think I learned how to write at Oxford. I did not go to any creative writing classes or anything.
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I always try to find things worth saying, things that are supposed to be said instead of being contrived. I do a ton of writing.
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I always imagined a writer was someone who lived in an attic in Paris, but my mum instilled in me a belief that I could do anything - so I ended up writing my first novel while working nights as a news reporter.
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I started writing my first book for young people when I was in college. I was only a couple of years out of my teens when I began; I felt closer to that experience than I did as an adult. But I've always been drawn to stories about young people.
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I kind of got more interested in writing after I turned in my last college essay and nobody was going to tell me what kind of academic papers to write anymore. I could write whatever I wanted, and I realized that I actually liked it when I could choose what I would write.
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It must have been when I was 14 or 15 that I started tentatively writing songs and was able to convey an emotion and a lyric with what I wanted to say.
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Writing is the easy part. The 'getting it right' part is harder.
