When you write what you know, you stay in control. One of the first things I encourage my writing students to do is to lose control – say what they want to say, break structure.
I tend to approach giving interviews with the same sense of circumspection and restraint as I approach my writing. That is to say, virtually none. When asked what I made of blogs like my own, blogs written by parents about their children, I said, ‘A blog like this is narcissism in its most obscene flowering.’
Many are ready, when listening to the inventor, to belittle and deny his achievements so that he will no longer be heard in honourable places, but after some months or a year, they use the inventor’s words in speech or writing or design.
In high school, my English teacher Celeste McMenamin introduced me to the great novels and Shakespeare and taught me how to write. Essays, poetry, critical analysis. Writing is a skill that was painful then but a love of mine now.
Your life isn’t about doing one perfect ‘thing’ and then falling down dead. It’s more like going to church or writing a book. You do it over and over, always trying to be a little bit better. Then you die.
It’s a different world: when I’m writing ‘Toast,’ I’ve got one foot in 1974 and one foot in the modern day, because the modern day is nowhere near as funny or interesting.
The storyboard department doesn’t talk to the layout department, which doesn’t talk to the writing department. They’re all jealous of each other.
They’re fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
My writing is jagged and harsh, I want it to remain that way; I don’t want it smoothed out.
We’re the only branch of government that explains itself in writing every time it makes a decision.
There is a prevailing school of thought that something good must take time, sometimes years to create and hone. I have always felt that the books I have written fastest have been my best – because I caught an unstoppable momentum in the writing.
I’d say writing songs is, for me, as much playing the tape recorder as it is playing guitar or writing words.
Writing genetic code like we do software will usher in a completely new way of living for all of us. When this happens, our society will be as fundamentally changed as we have seen from the invention of computers.
Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can’t be taught.
There’s something to be said for writing in the morning. At other points in the day, you’re a bit more defensive.
We are weak, writing is difficult, but for my own sake I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past.
It’s hard to be in the limelight and write songs that cater to fans that have expectations of you. We just want to write songs that we love, but all the different people with different ideas coming in make it difficult. We have to ask ourselves if we’re writing for the most important people: the fans.
Heartbreak can definitely give you a deeper sensibility for writing songs. I drew on a lot of heartbreak when I was writing my first album, I didn’t mean to but I just did.
I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.
I learned that there is an inner strength that blossoms when one cleanses themselves by processing and attempting to comprehend their situation and/or experience. Writing became my therapy!
When you’re writing first person, all I can see and tell as the author is what that main character can see.
Some people, through luck and skill, end up with a lot of assets. If you’re good at kicking a ball, writing software, investing in stocks, it pays extremely well.
When you’ve got good writing, you can kind of give up all the research, in a way, and start just following the emotional integrity of the journey of your character.
Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory. I like the atmospheres that result if episodes are narrated through the haze of memory.
Other people are talking about writing books about my life, or about some of the things I’ve done. I find it strange, but I also feel it’s my life and my story, and I guess I better be the one to get it on paper the way it actually happened.
I do want to work on writing, because writing’s a skill. Writing is something that you can train yourself to know better. To know yourself better. And it’s intimidating as hell.
The main problem with writing in verse is, if your fourth line doesn’t come out right, you’ve got to throw four lines away and figure out a whole new way to attack the problem. So the mortality rate is terrific.
Music was never just a hobby for me. I’d pick up a guitar every day to work on whatever I was writing at the time. I would put my ideas in songs the way some people might put them in diaries or journals.
And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.
I didn’t disappear; I started writing songs and worked behind the scenes.
The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.
I could have been a cult writer if I’d kept writing surrealistic novels. But I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book.
I began to see that the short texts I was writing were poster material.
Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.
I’m writing an unauthorized autobiography.
I work in a business environment forty hours a week, and writing is what I do to unwind. It allows me to transport myself to a happy place where I can indulge my hopes, beliefs, aspirations and fantasies. It also allows me to live and breathe a topic for eighteen months while I’m researching and writing.
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
I took a few months off after my senior year was over, and I prayed and tried to figure out what was my plan and my purpose. That’s how I started writing songs and playing guitar just to get my feelings out.
I started writing poetry when I was 12 years old and also undertook vocal training since a young age. However, it was only during my time at the University of Oxford did the musician in me came alive.
Painting and writing are solitary arts.
Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man’s thinking or his writing.
I like writing different types of music. I don’t like being stuck into one thing.
Writing is the supreme solace.
We’re moving from reading the genetic code to writing it.
I have recommended in my writings the study of civic virtues, without which there is no redemption. I have written likewise (and repeat my words) that reforms, to be beneficial, must come from above, that those which come from below are irregularly gained and uncertain.
I have never been able to read Agatha Christie – the pleasure is purely in the puzzle, and the reader is toyed with by someone who didn’t decide herself who the killer was until the end of the writing.
I’ve always done more than I ever thought I would. Becoming a professor – I never would have imagined that. Writing books – I never would have imagined that. Getting a Ph.D. – I’m not sure I would even have imagined that. I’ve lived my life a step at a time. Things sort of happened.
Writing is like any other sort of sport. In order for you to get better at it, you have to exercise the muscle.
And how is clarity to be achieved? Mainly by taking trouble and by writing to serve people rather than to impress them.
In the future, I’d like to continue being honest with myself and admit when I’d be better off asking someone else to illustrate my writing.
I don’t believe in condescending to children. I don’t change any writing technique.
When I lived in a little flat in Pimlico in 1981, I’d write in the hallway. As you walked in, there was a tiny little recess type thing, hardly a hallway, really, and I’d sit there writing songs with my guitar.
I am a writer… I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.
I’m always happy, in every game, every win I keep writing my history, and I hope to do even more from now on.
People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children’s book. I say, ‘If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children’s book’, but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you’re directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.
Anything that keeps you happy and writing is part of my writing ritual: I like music, so I tend to have it playing in the background. But if I’m interested, I can write in an airport waiting areas.
