When I wrote ‘Silver Linings,’ I thought I was writing a book about the Philadelphia Eagles and male bonding, but when the book came out, it was surprising to me that the mental health community embraced it.
The first rap that I wrote was about my Maths teacher, and as expected, he didn’t like it, but the students loved it!
There was always the consolation that if I didn’t like what I wrote I could throw it away or burn it.
I couldn’t get a job to save my life. That’s why I wrote ‘Road to Paloma.’ That got into Sundance and got into that scene, and that’s how I got the role in ‘The Red Road.’
It was a good 15 or 20 years before anyone at Rand would be in the same room with me. They didn’t want the question raised, ‘What’s your relationship with Daniel Ellsberg?’ And not one of them wrote me a letter because they didn’t want a letter of theirs to show up in my trash – which the FBI had been going through.
I wanted to have a body of work behind me before I wrote about racism.
Madly, futilely, I wrote novel after novel, eight in all, that failed to find a publisher. I persisted because for me the novel was the supreme literary form – not just one among many, not a relic of the past, but the way we communicate to one another the subtlest truths about this business of living.
My earlier poems were sadder than my poems are today, perhaps because I wrote them in confusion or when I was unhappy. But I am not a melancholy person, quite the contrary, no one enjoys laughing more than I do.
Writing is the hardest thing I know, but it was the only thing I wanted to do. I wrote for 20 years and published nothing before my first book.
Possibly he knew, as he wrote this, that he was mad – because inside every madman sits a little sane man saying ‘You’re mad, you’re mad.’
I wrote my thesis on welfare policy.
And all of Laura’s stuff, what they wrote originally wasn’t as good and Constance wound up doing that herself. That was all her stuff, reading to the child, because she had children herself and that’s what she would have done.
I know not, sir, whether Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, but if he did not, it seems to me that he missed the opportunity of his life.
When I wrote the lyrics, melodies, and the first themes of ‘Serendipity,’ I tried to come up with some rare things you find in life, something very special, like the calico, three-striped cat; things that have extraordinary meanings in people’s lives.
I wrote my first piece about the disruption of the Harvard Business School in 1999. Because you could see this coming. I haven’t yet done the one about the disruption of the Stanford Business School.
I wrote every day. I don’t think I could have written ‘Just Kids’ had I not spent all of the 80s developing my craft as a writer.
Writing about 2,000 words in three hours every morning, ‘Casino Royale’ dutifully produced itself. I wrote nothing and made no corrections until the book was finished. If I had looked back at what I had written the day before I might have despaired.
I didn’t even walk for graduation – I did graduate, though. I got this homeschool deal. I didn’t have to go to school because I was depressed, and my mom wrote all these essays for me. I didn’t write one of them. She literally got me my diploma.
I wrote an essay about leaf blowers and the evil they do.
I’ve always thought that whether I’m writing or not, I’ve gotta pick the best songs, whether or not they’re mine. I’m not gonna sing them just because I wrote them. I’ve gotta find the best songs to make the best record I can.
Growing up, I would watch a movie on video and would go to the back of the VHS and locate the address for Universal Pictures or MGM or whatever. I’d write to the studios asking them if I could be in a movie. They never wrote me back.
Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was.
That’s why I wrote this book: to show how these people can imbue us with hope. I read somewhere that when a person takes part in community action, his health improves. Something happens to him or to her biologically. It’s like a tonic.
When I was in sixth grade there was a talent show, and I wrote my first sketch, ‘The Dentist.’ I played the dentist, and I had my friend play a patient. It was sort of what can go wrong at the dentist, and I just remember I had lots of fake blood and everything.
A.J. Liebling, one of my heroes, used to say that he could write better than anyone who wrote faster, and faster than anyone who could write better. I’m one nine-hundredth as good as Liebling, but that principle may slightly apply.
When I was eight or nine, I wrote a new version of ‘Peter Pan’ for the school play. They didn’t use it – I imagine it was unperformable – but as recompense for not doing my script, I was offered any role, and instinctively went for Captain Hook. I came on trying to be terrifying, but everyone laughed at me.
I wrote to the local news guy when I was 12 years old. I said, ‘What do I need to do to be you one day?’
I wrote The Same Sea not as a political allegory about Israelis and Palestinians. I wrote it about something much more gutsy and immediate. I wrote it as a piece of chamber music.
If you wrote something, you deserve to get paid and recognized for your work. No one should take a bow with another man’s hat.
I wrote that letter, and the one to Nixon. And I wrote more letters, and I thought it might be a magazine article. At that time I sent it to Esquire and Playboy, but anyway, I kept writing, and all of sudden I had enough and thought, well maybe it is a book.
When India conducted nuclear tests in 1974, I wrote a letter to then-Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto from Holland and offered my services for Pakistani nuclear programme.
I grew up in a working-class Catholic family in south Louisiana. I went to a state university. I taught literature, wrote a novel that was the novel I wanted to write, and got a couple of good reviews but no real traction. I had no idea how to get a job in TV.
I wish I wrote more about the world at more distance from myself.
I’m a black Catholic raised in Decatur, Georgia, which was very gang-infested. Then, I went to an all-white private high school and excelled in sports and wrote poetry, then played football at the University of Georgia, minoring in drama.
I was sad Jon Ronson, who wrote in the Guardian and has made a TV show for Channel 4, took against me.
When we write, we complement each other. We wrote six songs, Barry and I, while Robin was ill during the American tour, and they were terrible until Robin came back, and then everything worked out.
I met Arcade Fire on their first record, ‘Funeral.’ I loved that record, and it was a record I was listening to while I wrote ‘Where the Wild Things Are.’ Those songs – especially ‘Wake Up’ and ‘Neighbourhood’ – there’s a lot of that record that’s about childhood.
When I was a kid, I wrote music – from the age of 11 until the age of 18.
In the Emperor’s New Clothes, they got a different celebrity to do each voice. They drew up a picture of each character and then each actor wrote their own part.
I started rapping at the age of 12. That’s when I wrote my first song, but I was more intrigued on learning how the recording process works: how do you create music and what materials I needed. So I educated myself musically so that I could focus on creating my own.
My paintings have gotten to be pretty popular and I’ve taken a little bit more interest in painting the last few years. In fact, my novel that I wrote not too long ago, ‘The Hornet’s Nest,’ I painted the cover picture for it and I do a good bit of painting now.
I’m not sure if they do this in the States, but in Korea, until high school, on your graduation diploma there’s a line that states your future goal. Kids write ‘president’ or ‘astronaut,’ or whatever. I always wrote ‘singer.’
I’ve always kind of wrote when I wanted to. Once I get the idea in my head and get it outlined out, I usually just sit and write until it’s done.
And we had our own laws. I mean, I wrote them. And we had our own customs, and traditions, and proprieties.
I always wrote about things that were important to me. I think our past success showed that it was also important for a lot of others.
I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.
I save everything. I have these carefully organized file boxes. Somewhere in there is a section of the ‘New York Times’ where I wrote ‘The Border Guard’ in the margin.
I just fell in love with his music. I thought Yanni was Japanese. I didn’t have any idea what a Yanni was. I just thought I was in love with a Japanese man who wrote beautiful music.
We wrote verses that condemned us, with no hope of pardon, to the most bitter solitude.
I’ve been campaigning like anything for restoring these changes. For 27 years. I wrote a book about it, well, a portion of the book was devoted to these scenes and why they should have been in the movie.
Boulez seemed to me to be a guy who wrote laws. Like a company lawyer.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
When I first wrote for orchestra, I didn’t realize, when you have 20 people playing a violin line, that is very different than one person playing that line.
