No writer of a portion of the Bible was perfect. It was the direct and miraculous operation of the Holy Spirit that what they wrote is without mistake.
My mother was an actress in comedies. My father wrote scenarios. They were not opposed to my being an actor. I really didn’t know what it meant, but I wanted to be one anyway.
I wrote as a very angry young man, believing he was going to be killed in a world war.
‘Somebody That I Used to Know,’ like a lot of the record, was a bit of a struggle to finish. It was written fairly quickly – I wrote it in November 2010 – but it took six months to find Kimbra and really realize she was the right vocalist to make the female part come to life. There were constant hurdles.
He’s my favorite! He wrote and produced, and starred in and cast all of his movies! Can you imagine? I get really excited when I talk about Charlie Chaplin.
Yeah I do and I don’t mind, in fact that is one of the real encouraging things about this whole career of mine is that there are tunes I wrote almost thirty years ago that I will still play in front of an audience and I still like the old tunes.
As far as I’m concerned, ‘The Caretaker’ is funny up to a point. Beyond that, it ceases to be funny, and it was because of that point that I wrote it.
I tried, after I wrote ‘Twilight,’ to read ‘The Historian,’ because it was the big thing that summer. But I can’t read other people’s vampires. If it’s too close, I get upset; if it’s too far away, I get upset. It just makes me very neurotic.
When I wrote my book I wanted to love someone. I wanted to be in love. Now I know that I shall never be in love – and I no longer wish to be.
At the time I wrote Xone I had never been on the Internet.
When I wrote ‘Noughts and Crosses’, I was halfway through it when I realised this was very like ‘Romeo and Juliet’… as long as you make it your own, and put your own spin on it, I think it’s brilliant to use other great work to find your own voice.
I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.
When I was still in prep school – 14, 15 – I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things.
I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson’s poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.
One of the things I’ve always liked about my husband is he’s very good at lots of stuff. He was an English teacher when I met him. He wrote poetry and played the guitar. As time went on, he decided to go into economics, so he’s very analytical and mathematical in addition to his artsy side.
It doesn’t really feel like it’s got anything to do with me. I mean, I know I wrote it, and all that and invented the characters and made it up, but it’s Mike’s film, so doing the press and stuff, it feels a little bit inauthentic. I was just one component of it.
My ambition, a long time ago, was to be a film music writer. A compromise then was to be the guy who wrote songs for a band and played slide guitar. Then the singer didn’t turn up for an audition, and I was the only one who knew the words. That was it – bingo! Life took a different course.
I tweet myself and do all the Facebook updates. It started off with me wondering whether I was showing off and I was very careful about what I wrote.
I never thought what I wrote was good enough to be published. I thought of myself as completely detached from that constellation of real writers. It was completely for myself.
The Room I wrote in 1957, and I was really gratified to find that it stood up. I didn’t have to change a word.
I wrote my first book at 20, but my whole focus from about the age of 12 was to be a writer.
The first book I ever wrote was in fourth grade and it was called ‘Billy’s Booger.’ It was an autobiographical piece about a kid who was really bad at math.
Oh, yes, we were on location with Another Man’s Poison, which I wrote for Bette Davis.
In my first book, Under Fire, I wrote that I revered Ronald Reagan. That was a dozen years ago. I still feel that way. I think he changed the world for the better for my children and my children’s children.
There’s the Bacon society, which is fostered by his fourth wife Helen Bacon, but I don’t know what kind of performances his music gets. He wrote symphonic music and some chorale music.
For me, how I feel about what I wrote down turns into a song.
I don’t remember writing anything until I wrote my college application.
‘Mean’ is a song I wrote about somebody who wrote things that were so mean so many times that it would ruin my day. Then it would ruin the next day. And it would level me so many times, I just felt like I was being hit in the face every time this person would take to their computer.
Morrissey wrote to me and said, I have a song for you and if we release it as a single, you’ll be on the charts for the first time since 1972, I said, what time, where?
A government institution called the Finnish Film Foundation funds filmmaking there, and I wrote several screenplays but never got any money. They were sent back to me, and they said that they were too commercial for them.
I wrote for a weekly magazine and then edited a literary magazine, but I did not really feel comfortable with the profession of journalism itself.
I wrote most of ‘Hello in There’ in a relay box, which looks like a mail box, only bigger. Sometimes, it was so cold and windy on my mail route that I’d go inside the relay box and eat a sandwich, just to get away from the wind. I remember working on ‘Hello in There’ inside the relay box.
As a teenager I wrote to R.A. Lafferty. And he responded, too, with letters that were like R.A. Lafferty short stories, filled with elliptical answers to straight questions and simple answers to complicated ones.
Being a young black man, observing and sensing the need for race equality and women’s rights, I wrote about what was important to me.
When I wrote ‘The Rozabal Line,’ I had no preconceived notions of what a commercial bestseller should be. I have always viewed ‘The Rozabal Line’ as my first love and probably my best work. The fact, however, is that it is my least read work.
I’ve got a role in the new Billy Bob Thornton movie that Billy Bob wrote and is going to direct called ‘Jayne Mansfield’s Car.’ I only have four scenes, but I have as much dialogue as anybody in the movie.
I don’t write about certain arguments I have with my wife. I’d get my head torn off if wrote about certain things.
The first comedy screenplay that I wrote was Animal House and I always thought I could and should be a director but no one was about to give me that opportunity on Animal House.
I believe that the Framers of the Constitution made their intent clear when they wrote the First Amendment. I believe they wanted to keep the new government from endorsing one religion over another, not erase the public consciousness or common faith.
The first thing I wrote was a one-act play that got accepted at a one-act play festival, and I was in it along with Nathan Lane and a couple of other very good actors.
I was writing very early, like I was involved in our high school literary magazine, which was called ‘Pariah.’ The football team was the Bears, and the literary magazine was ‘Pariah.’ It was great. It was definitely a real sub-culture. But I wrote stories for them.
I wrote probably my phattest banging record with Knife Party: ‘Pile Driver.’
I wrote the first book, and I thought people would say: ‘Separate and unequal schools in the City of Boston? I didn’t know that. Let’s go out and fix it.’
Brahms believed that there was no need to publish absolutely everything that Schubert ever wrote.
I first got to know Charles in the late seventies when I wrote an article and then a book about him and I think at the time he came across as quite appealing, it was probably the height of his popularity.
I grew up in a place where everybody was a storyteller, but nobody wrote. It was that kind of Celtic, storytelling tradition: everybody would have a story at the pub or at parties, even at the clubs and raves.
It was like a dream come true for me. When you write the book, it’s still intimate. It might have been a best-seller but it’s still my story, as I wrote it. The moment we or they make a movie, it’s not my story anymore. There’s a lot of letting go involved in the process.
I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization.
I’m obsessed with ‘Thelma and Louise,’ and therefore obsessed with Callie Khouri who wrote that movie.
For years, I believed that anything worth doing was worth doing early. In graduate school, I submitted my dissertation two years in advance. In college, I wrote my papers weeks early and finished my thesis four months before the due date. My roommates joked that I had a productive form of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
