The emotions triggered by fiction are very real. When Charles Dickens wrote about the death of Little Nell in the 1840s, people wept – and I’m sure that the death of characters in J.K. Rowling’s ‘Harry Potter’ series led to similar tears.
In 1988, my mother led a nationwide election campaign, wrote a bestselling book, had her first child, and became the youngest and first female prime minister of the Muslim world. All in one year! For her detractors, this wasn’t good enough. She was unacceptable because she was a woman.
I wrote about people who liked fake fireplaces in their parlor, who thought a brass horse with a clock embedded in its flank was wonderful.
The first newspaper I worked on was the ‘Springfield Union’ in Springfield, Massachusetts. I wrote over a hundred letters to newspapers asking for work and got three responses, two no’s.
I taught workshops at universities. I wrote for magazines. This took time and insane amounts of juggling, but it’s how I earned a living.
Well, I never got into the young adult headspace. With ‘Twilight,’ they are pretty adult themes, aside from maybe the first one, but even that. They’re very adult themes, actually, particularly as the characters age. I never wrote for young adults. I wrote for myself, as an audience.
I am glad that I wrote something that brought joy to millions of people.
That’s such a thrill – a story I wrote at the beginning of my career, and it’s still packin’ the house.
I had bohemian parents in Seattle in the last ’60s living in a houseboat. My dad wrote science fiction novels and painted big murals and oil paintings.
At art school, a teacher said: ‘The best paintings are when you get lost in a piece of work and start painting in a stream of consciousness.’ I wanted to do music, not art, so started writing lyrics that way. The first song I wrote was called ‘Ice Cream and Wafers.’ The next was ‘Holding Back the Years.’
Paul the apostle recounted that Jesus appeared to more than 500 of His followers at one time, the majority of whom were still alive and who could confirm what Paul wrote.
I wrote about scenarios that I was going through and then disguised them.
The only joy I had was writing what was. That book was. It no longer amuses me to be all the things I was when I wrote that. But it is my story as I was then.
Look, in 1800 the sainted Thomas Jefferson arranged to hire a notorious slanderer named James Callender, who worked as a writer at a Republican newspaper in Richmond, Va. Read some of what he wrote about John Adams. This was a personal slander.
My approach to recording and all that is pretty organic. It just has to do with all the songs I wrote; go in and record them.
When I was very young, I used to share much of what I wrote with my family, but as I got older and more self-conscious, it became a much more private process.
John wrote with a very deep love for the human race and a concern for its future.
My writing improved the more I wrote – and the more I read good writing, from Shakespeare on down.
Right at the end of the war I wrote a piano sonata, which was written at a time when Sam Barber used to come down here and we used to have lunch together in a very nice old hotel that’s now not there.
One of the people that wrote a forward to my book is Gerry Spence, whom I admire. Gerry is a friend of mine, and Gerry’s perhaps the leading criminal defense attorney in the country.
‘Peace Train’ is a song I wrote, the message of which continues to breeze thunderously through the hearts of millions. There is a powerful need for people to feel that gust of hope rise up again.
I worked initially in very low-budget independent films that I often wrote. My early work was all written by myself, and then I adapted ‘Tsotsi,’ so I was used to the writing process being, in a way, integral to my directing. I felt it really prepared me.
My theory is that I decided to be a writer when I was about seven, but of course it is not as simple as that. Like most writers, I had to work at other things to earn a living and wrote mainly in the evenings, often very late at night, for many years.
I wrote ‘Mistress of Spices’ at an unusual time when I had a near-death experience after the birth of my second son.
I knew that if I wrote a new book every six months or every year, if I continued to read great books, eventually I would write something worthy of publication. I understood I might be in my forties or my fifties or even my sixties, but I felt confident that it would happen.
I wrote, exercised, ate healthy, and responded to life in prison very well.
The worst storyline I’ve ever been involved in I wasn’t involved in, because I was clever enough to get pregnant with my second child and they wrote me out and they replaced me with Christine Jones. And thank God – that was the worst storyline.
If you are feeling something, then Shakespeare felt it and wrote about it – and wrote about it so eloquently.
Part of what I loved – and love – about being around older people is the tangible sense of history they embody. I’m interested in military history, for instance, because both my grandfathers fought in World War II. I’m interested in writing because one of those grandfathers wrote books.
They put a picture of me on a magazine’s cover and wrote ‘Mahima had an accident. She’s got scars all over the face. We can actually call her scarface.’ It still hurts me.
Right when I moved to L.A., I started writing. I wrote some screenplay. I’m sure it’s terrible. But I wrote a screenplay by myself. When I first moved to L.A., I had no friends. I didn’t know anybody. I just sat in a little studio apartment, and I wrote a screenplay.
My next project will be a Christian album, another one. I wrote the songs for the ones you’re referring to, but I want to do some of my old gospel favorites. That’s what my next album’s going to be.
‘Rise Up’ is definitely my baby. I think it was a gift because, you know, it’s like God just spoke to me and wrote that song. It’s very powerful.
I wrote ‘Legends of the Fall’ in nine days, but I had been thinking about it for a few years.
I think it goes back to my high school days. In computer class, the first assignment was to write a program to print the first 100 Fibonacci numbers. Instead, I wrote a program that would steal passwords of students. My teacher gave me an A.
Every time I write a song I feel really lucky and kind of surprised. Not surprised that I wrote it, but just surprised that things exist that you don’t know about.
It takes me a long time to get with a landscape. It took me 20 years before I wrote anything about Ibiza, and I haven’t written about Oregon yet, although I’ve been there 20 years – possibly I’m almost due.
More than 25 miles off the coast of Massachusetts and only 14 miles long, Nantucket is, as Herman Melville wrote in ‘Moby-Dick,’ ‘away off shore.’
I always sang standards because the songs I wrote for myself weren’t as easy to sing.
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
It’s not fair that people wrote that all of my films had not done well. There were a few films like ‘Nippu,’ ‘Devudu Chesina Manushulu’ and ‘Sarostaru’ which were really bad. But, ‘Veera’ and ‘Dharuvu’ had done well. Strangely, people have added them to my ‘flop list.’
Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
I like to know that when I’m 90 years old, I’m going to be able to look at a song or poem I wrote and say, ‘Wow! I remember I was so crazy about this person,’ or ‘I remember what that day felt like.’
Like, I kind of developed my musical style in a vacuum. Even though I listen to a lot of stuff, the way I wrote was in my bedroom, really privately. It’s still the way I write, actually.
I always wrote poems when I was a little girl, and I loved hip hop music, and I kind of just started writing poems over beats, and that’s when I started rapping.
When I was sixteen or seventeen, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a playwright. But everything I wrote, I thought, was weak. And I can remember falling asleep in tears because I had no talent the way I wanted to have.
I didn’t write ‘Snow White’ for any class, but I got bitten by the screenwriting bug and wrote a couple of scripts in my spare time instead of going to keg parties or something.
