Writing Quotes
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A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.
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I am writing this during my lunch period, because I need to reach towards the outside world of sanity, because I am overwhelmed by the sheer weight of the clerical work still to be done, and because at this hour of the morning normal ladies are still sleeping.
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Reading isn't about managing expectations. In certain ways, writing is. You're trying to send signals early in a book about what might be coming later, but I think worrying about the kind of chatter around a book is something I try and stay as far away from when I'm reading.
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So the real drama for me is balancing live performances and writing, and one of the ways I balance it is I write in hotel rooms. That's not exactly balancing. Actually, writing in hotel rooms means that I'm refusing to deal with the problem.
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I'm writing exactly the kinds of books I like to write. And they're the kinds of books I like to read. They're popular commercial fiction. That's what they are.
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I realized going back and writing and explaining in details the difficulties I had lived actually became emotional again. It's like therapy but sometimes therapy can be painful. But it's part of life and part of the autobiography so I'll have to finish it sooner or later.
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I never have written a movie, but there are some bad movies out there. I can make one. I definitely want to get into that because that's how you, at my level, would get a lead in a movie - by writing a low budget thing for myself. So I gotta get to it.
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When I'm writing a book, I don't have any responsibility to anyone. I'm solitary. I'm writing on my own. I write by hand. And I write every day. I mean, it's part of my daily discipline.
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I just wrote what I felt like writing since they seemed to sell.
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I made a decision when I started writing 'All is Song' to take the compliments I had for 'The Wilderness' and try to be confident and not overwhelmed by it.
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Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing. So, reading Tolstoy several times - 'War and Peace,' 'The Kreutzer Sonata' - all those were really important to me.
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I labored for eight years thinking I was writing a book for adults that was a nostalgic look back on childhood. Then my publisher informed me I'd written a children's book.
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I flew into a small airport surrounded by cornfields and pastures, ready to carry out the two commands my father had written out for me the night before I left Calcutta: Spend two years studying creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, then come back home and marry the bridegroom he selected for me from our caste and class.
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So that's why one of my rules of parody writing is that it's gotta be funny regardless of whether you know the source material. It has to work on its own merit.
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All my kids play guitar, sing, and dabble with writing.
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I was always enjoying the moment. Acting, writing, looking for roles and getting involved with people and trying to create something that would be entertaining to people. With 'E.R.,' we were all very lucky to get this combination of people together in the right story in the right way to take it to the level it has reached.
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You're successful if you can get one person to pick it up and put it on the turntable and go, Wow, thanks for writing that!
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It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
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It's really not the genre for me, or the venue, it's the writing.
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I feel like you just need to keep writing until the writing itself just begins to take shape.
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Sometimes I've called writing a disease. If so, I'm glad that it caught me.
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I'm writing, and just doing the same thing I always do.
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I'd excluded New York from my writing, and then I came back and I fell in love with it all over again. The energy comes from an absence, that yearning for New York when you are not there.
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A major focus of 'Reality Hunger' is appropriation and plagiarism and what these terms mean. I can hardly treat the topic deeply without engaging in it. That would be like writing a book about lying and not being permitted to lie in it.
