It’s a weird thing. Rick Springfield wrote ‘Jessie’s Girl,’ and he probably gets sick of talking about ‘Jessie’s Girl.’ The thing is, I didn’t write ‘Blurred Lines.’ I didn’t direct the music video. I’m really happy for the success, but it is kind of a funny thing to follow me around.
I did go there later, but I hadn’t been there before I wrote the book. Sometimes I feel like the imagined can feel more real than the real?
The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.
And it was out in the theaters in two weeks. This is not, ‘We’re going to develop twenty-five and maybe one’s going to get made,’ so the first three things I wrote got up on the screen and, good, bad or indifferent, I got to see them on their feet.
I think it’s silly for anyone to think you could write under the influence, but if they’d like to think that, I’d like to keep the legend alive. Maybe I was under the influence when I wrote Jesus’ Son and I just didn’t know it.
If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.
I wrote ‘Time Stops at Shamli’ in 1956, shortly after ‘The Room on the Roof’ was published, and I couldn’t find anyone to publish it.
I was born with a silver microphone in my mouth, and that was an advantage. My father wrote books and was also a great broadcaster.
‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.
I get so excited when a song I wrote that’s very personal to me goes No. 1 and I look down and see people singing the words back to me.
I wrote on the fourth season of ‘Arrested Development.’
I loved to write when I was a child. I wrote, but I always thought it was something that you did as a child, then you put away childish things.
Growing up in Memphis and listening to all kinds of music and dreaming… So that was one of the first times I wrote a complete song and set it to music and the whole bit. From then on, I was busy with it.
For some reason, I wrote about the bed we slept in when I was a kid. It was a half-acre of misery, that bed, sagging in the middle, red hair sticking out of the mattress, the spring gone and the fleas leaping all over the place.
I started off as a journalist when I was young and I did not get paid unless I wrote three stories a day.
Once I had all the facts in, I found I didn’t have the immoral courage to pull the caper. So I wrote it as a story. As a teenager, I didn’t have any skills for writing as such, so it came out in 1500 words.
Take any writer you want in the 19th century: they wrote with quill pens, dipping a piece of goose feather in ink and writing. And yet we read those novels today, and if we’re sensitive to them, we respond to them with an immediacy that is stronger than anything written today on a word processor.
I can barely remember what I wrote yesterday, let alone 10 years ago.
Shakespeare and his work will always be relevant. He wrote those pieces hundreds of years ago and we haven’t really changed as humans, have we? We have to deal with love, honour and adultery now – people were the same then, too – that’s what’s so wonderful and powerful.
I never wrote. I also never really thought about being an actor. But when it was time to go to high school, we couldn’t afford private school, so I tried out for all the special schools in New York.
I was very, very religious. And of course I wrote about it in ‘Night.’ I questioned God’s silence. So I questioned. I don’t have an answer for that. Does it mean that I stopped having faith? No. I have faith, but I question it.
Hair is also a problem. I remember once, when I was reporting from Beirut at the height of the civil war, someone wrote in to the BBC complaining about my appearance.
Somebody wrote a script around us, but Dustin Abraham came with the best one.
Well, I think that when you direct a movie or write it. And in the case of the two movies I did, I wrote and directed, they occupy a special place for you.
I have been writing since I was about 20, and at first I wrote in secret and never showed anybody. I was very concerned about making a living, so I conducted.
During the year 1894, Pierre Curie wrote me letters that seem to me admirable in their form. No one of them was very long, for he had the habit of concise expression, but all were written in a spirit of sincerity and with an evident anxiety to make the one he desired as a companion know him as he was.
Of course I danced a lot when I was making ‘Swingers.’ The swing music scene was big in Hollywood, and I went to places like The Derby. And, after I wrote it and was trying to get it made, I would go every week so I’d be good at dancing.
My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature – science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.
I wrote my thesis on the benefits of war and very near got thrown out of college. But I can show you where the greatest advancement of mankind comes under stress and strain, not comfort.
I wrote because I needed to and wanted to. It never occurred to me that I’d become famous.
When I did ‘Happy Birthday,’ I wrote the treatment for the video before I wrote the record. And once I wrote the video, I had a clear understanding of what I wanted; I created the soundtrack to that video.
I came up with a story and I wrote it.
I never kept a diary, but I wrote detailed notes of my travels.
When I look back at my career as an author, I don’t look at the first book that was ever published as to where my career began – I look to the first book that I ever wrote.
I can’t stay mad very long. I get grumpy when I read a bad review. I say, ‘How could he say that about my music?’ Then I forget about it. If I got mad every time somebody wrote something negative about me, I’d be exploding all the time. I’d be burned out just from reading reviews.
My sense of a poem – my notion of how you revise – is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.
This ceremony and the intellectual aura associated with the Nobel Prizes have grown from the wisdom of a practical chemist who wrote a remarkable will.
I was a little concerned that a lot of people thought I wrote Merchant Ivory movies. I also thought if I was ever going to write something strange and difficult, that was the time.
Sometimes literary critics review the book they wanted you to write, not the book you wrote, and that’s very irksome.
Of course, I’m older now. I’m in a different place in my life than when I wrote the songs for ‘Car Wheels’ or ‘Essence’ or whatever. Different things were going on.
I wrote my own play, ‘The Westie Monologues,’ about where I’m from in Australia, and it was very successful. From that, I started getting offers from television.
What influenced me was Tori Amos, who was unapologetic about expressing anger through music, and Sinead O’Connor. Those two in particular were really moving for me, and very inspiring, before I wrote ‘Jagged Little Pill.’
I sang ‘O Holy Night’ with the Vatican orchestra, but also a Blake – a lullaby that William Blake wrote for the Christ child, and I set it to music, and the Vatican orchestra played the music.
I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.
Yea, I wrote my college thesis on why college athletes should get paid. I think there’s a way to do it based on the amount of revenue they generate.
When I stopped performing for 16 years and lived in Michigan and was married and raising my children, I wrote about four or five books. I haven’t published them. I just haven’t gotten around to it for several reasons.
I was around computers from birth; we had one of the first Macs, which came out shortly before I was born, and my dad ran a company that wrote computer operating systems. I don’t think I have any particular technical skills; I just got a really large head start.
I would love to have a song that I wrote by myself to win a ‘Song of the Year’ award.
When I was 21, I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for ‘The Simpsons’ who’d briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.
My dad was always such a frustrated artist. He always worked very hard to support his family, doing a bunch of ridiculous jobs. He wanted to be a painter, but then he also wrote science-fiction novels in his spare time.
Tonight I am going to take a party to the headquarters of the fire department, where I have a cinch on the captain, a very nice fellow, who is unusually grateful for something I wrote about him and his men. They are going to do the Still Alarm act for me.
In my late teenage years, I developed a real passion for it, and wrote a lot of poetry.
One song I do is ‘The First Cut is the Deepest.’ I try to remind people I wrote that song, not Rod Stewart.
I wrote on a show called Johnny Bravo when I was at Hanna-Barbera.
I first wrote for adults, but when I started writing for young people, it was the most creative and liberating experience of my life. I was able to express my own deepest feelings far more than I ever could when writing for adults.
