My first real break was when my college sketch troupe, The State, was asked to contribute pieces for a new MTV show called ‘You Wrote It, You Watch It.’
You know, one of the only times I ever wrote about art was the obituary of Warhol that I did for the Village Voice.
‘The Big Lebowski’ was something we wrote for Jeff Bridges, and we set it aside for a couple of years because he wasn’t available.
Til 1983, I wrote primarily for other psychologists and expected that they would be the principal audience for my book.
The first book I wrote was The Bride Price which was a romantic book, but my husband burnt the book when he saw it. I was the typical African woman, I’d done this privately, I wanted him to look at it, approve it and he said he wouldn’t read it.
I wrote Steve Carell’s last episode. I think it was a really good episode, but there’s always a tension between what’s good for the series and what’s good for an episode, because the more closure you put on an episode, the more significant feeling it is.
When I wrote ‘Barefoot in Paris,’ I wanted to make simple recipes that you could make at home that tasted like French classics.
When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval.
And he said that he wrote the Bond character based on the character of David Niven. That’s how he saw Bond.
For me, and this may not be everybody, but because I do love country music so much, there’s such a feeling of home in Nashville, especially because it’s such a small town. You bring up one song, everybody knows who wrote it, everybody knows their mother and what their cell number is, and all of the stories.
I have only read very classic traditional English ghost stories, other than Henry James, who wrote some magnificent short ones as well as the longer ‘Turn of the Screw.’ He, Dickens, and M.R. James are my influences.
I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then… it’s sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that’s fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats.
In my own defense, I wrote a one-man show, and that to me was more where I fit.
If I wrote a musical it wouldn’t be about me. Although I do some magic, so it would probably be about a magician who appeared and re-appeared all over the place.
At Plymouth I wrote ‘Neil Warnock’s Wembley Way’, a one-year diary, to show people what being a manager was like. I got lucky as the year ended with us winning promotion through the play-offs at Wembley.
About a year ago, out of the blue, I just wrote a bunch of songs.
I wrote the tunes and sang only nonsense words. Then came Moore and dressed them with the lyrics.
It was that famous joke: What’s the last thing the drummer said before he got kicked out of the band? ‘Hey, I wrote a song.’
I looked through our catalog year by year, and I saw that there were pockets of time when we wrote some terrific songs. Then all of a sudden, we’d go for another two or three months and there weren’t great songs.
I can look back at stuff I wrote in my early days and squirm at some of the mistakes I made. But we’re all learning every day; we never stop. I just hope people keep on liking what I do. That gives me such a kick.
The very paradigm of revolution, of right versus wrong, good versus bad, is a relic with no bearing on the present. Yet artists, exhibitions, and curators valorize the sixties. People who wrote about these artists 30 years ago still write about them in the same ways, often for the same magazines.
If you want to put out a song that you wrote yesterday, tomorrow go on Twitter, type in a new URL, and give it to the people!
Twenty years ago, I wrote a book called ‘It Takes a Village.’ And a lot of people looked at the title and asked, ‘What the heck do you mean by that?’ This is what I mean. None of us can raise a family, build a business, heal a community or lift a country totally alone.
I might do my own independent film, that my husband wrote for me, if all the ducks are in a row.
Every time there’s a revolution, it comes from somebody reading a book about revolution. David Walker wrote a book and Nat Turner did his thing.
I wrote what I felt I had to write, and I’m willing to put my own sanity and my reputation behind it.
There’s nothing more thrilling than watching great actors say things that you wrote and bring them to life.
In some ways I think it would be very dignified if I went away for twenty years and then wrote my fourth book.
Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.
But the character was so successful, that first one, that they wrote him again and he came in right at the end of the first year in a show called THE BOX. I was up for the Emmy for that one too.
‘Boyz-n-the-Hood’ was actually supposed to be written for Eazy’s group. He had a group out in New York called Home Boys Only, called HBO. One of them looked like LL Cool J. Eazy wanted to write a song for them, a street song, like what we were doing on the mix tapes. So when I wrote it, it was too West Coast for them.
When I wrote the eight fairy tales that appear in ‘Horse, Flower, Bird’ I was working toward a completely new form of artistic expression, trying to create a new kind of tale that also felt vintage: innocent and childlike, but haunted. I tried to write a picture-less picture book.
Every time I wrote fiction, I was discouraged, and every time I wrote nonfiction, I was encouraged.
As for action movies, I did Tarzan, and I’m also about to shoot Meltdown, which John Carpenter wrote.
The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote.
I was always depressed growing up. There wasn’t a reason for it, I just was. I was sad and morose. I cried a lot, I wrote a lot, and I read a lot; and that was how I dealt with it.
‘Dear Mr. Henshaw’ came about because two different boys from different parts of the country asked me to write a book about a boy whose parents were divorced, and so I wrote ‘Dear Mr. Henshaw,’ and it won the Newbery, and I was – it’s been very popular.
I bought a selection of short, romantic fiction novels, studied them, decided that I had found a formula and then wrote a book that I figured was the perfect story. Thank goodness it was rejected.
I wrote so much about fandom and participation for NPR that I eventually realized my most fertile way of participating in music is to actually play it, at least in a way that made the most sense to me.
I like the guys who wrote their own stuff and were able to perform it, like Seth Rogen. He popped off so young. When he did ‘The 40-Year-Old Virgin,’ and he was a co-producer on the movie, I was like, ‘Oh my God: that’s exactly what I want to do.’
I was 18, at art school, and saw this cute boy playing banjo. I was obsessed. I taught myself how to play. I listened to a lot of country and just messed around. The second song I wrote on the banjo was ‘Good to Be a Man.’ That what’s got me signed.
In 1982, I wrote in my diary that life is motion, not joy. If the way you measure success in life is by how much joy it brings you, you’re measuring inaccurately. Life is also sadness, defeat, striving. It is many things.
I figure I wrote 37 songs in 20 years, and that’s not exactly a full-time job. It wasn’t that I was writing and writing and writing and quit. Every now and then I wrote something, and every now and then I didn’t. The second just outnumbered the first.
When I wrote the song, I had the sea near Bombay in mind. We stayed at a hotel by the sea, and the fishermen come up at five in the morning and they were all chanting. And we went on the beach and we got chased by a mad dog – big as a donkey.
Screwing things up is a virtue. Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can’t read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.
I was fortunate that I was at newspapers for eight years, where I wrote at least five or six stories every week. You get used to interviewing lots of different people about a lot of different things. And they aren’t things you know about until you do the story.
I remember my father banging away on an IBM Selectric in the garage. He wrote his first novels on that machine. I remember its pebbly surface, its cold heft. It made its mark, literally and violently.
I Tweeted Keri Hilson the other day and she actually wrote back! I was so excited.
I wrote ‘Time of the Dark’ in 1978 and ‘The Silent Tower’ in 1984, so the thing that sticks out for me is how totally technology has changed. I suppose that’s the great peril for real-world crossovers.
My older sister encouraged me from early on and bought me one of the first guitars I had. She listened to all of the crappy songs that I wrote when I was 8 years old and encouraged me to keep doing it.
I wrote for ‘King of the Hill’ for three seasons.
I feel relief after the transfer window is closed. I got tired of reading and listening every day about me leaving or staying at Liverpool. Everyone wrote ‘Dejan is here, Dejan is there,’ and they knew nothing!
I don’t think my wife likes me very much, when I had a heart attack she wrote for an ambulance.
