My sister and I wrote some songs together under a project called Sala Says Mhyp when I was 17. Sala is our cat. She died, and we wanted to do something in honor of our her. We were a proper cat family.
I was probably 35 when I wrote the first story. The voice is kind of a mix in that it has a young voice, but it’s also someone who’s looking back. I like that kind of double vision.
Someone once said that history has more imagination than all the scenario writers in the Pentagon, and we have a lot of scenario writers here. No one ever wrote a scenario for commercial airliners crashing into the World Trade Center.
I heard about the book and I said, ‘Oh my god, I’ve got to read this book,’ and I didn’t know that a white woman wrote it. Nobody said that to me, they just said, ‘The Help – Oh my god, you’ve got to read it.’ Everyone failed to mention it was a white woman, I think, because nobody really wants to talk about race.
Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote!
I loved the last album, and it was one hundred percent me. But this is like me two years later, who understands a little bit more about music and understands a little bit more about making an album. I wrote a lot more.
I wrote ‘Evil Spider’ about wanting someone that’s already taken. I guess it was based on a personal experience, but I went a lil extreme on the theme… me being a spider trying to snare someone. In real life, I was just observing!
The first song I wrote was called ‘Here I Go Falling In Love’ I wrote it in the sixth grade.
My favorite is ‘The Last Coyote.’ I’m not saying that’s the best book I’ve written; I hope I haven’t written my best book yet, but that one was the first book I wrote as a full-time author, with my full-time focus. I have a nostalgic feeling about it.
With our first record, we wrote concept songs but not a concept record.
First of all, Shakespeare is about pleasure and interest. He was from the first moment he actually wrote something for the stage, and he remains so.
Morrissey wrote a really gorgeous song for me. I’m crazy for that man. And he thinks I’m hip!
Gibson wrote ‘Neuromancer’ on a typewriter, you know, before the technology he was writing about existed.
I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn’t realize then that it’s the same impulse. It’s make-believe. It’s performance.
When the Exxon Valdez spilled in 1989, I was angry. I even wrote on the back of my car, Boycott Exxon!
When I wrote songs like ‘Everyone I Love is Dead,’ I never thought about how I was going to execute them live.
See, I never wrote arrangements for the band for Judy Garland; I did strictly special material, special lyrics, put together all of her medleys.
New-Year’s Day arriving, and the ministers, to whom I wrote, remaining silent, I consider their silence as evidence, that they cannot prove what I said not to be from the Lord, and have therefore published as I was directed.
I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.
You made a lot of mistakes, and you wrote a lot of crap. But it was all part of the learning process.
I basically wrote the code and the specs and documentation for how the client and server talked to each other.
I wrote ‘Me and Ma’ to celebrate a beautiful phase of my life with people.
I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task – based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote.
With songs, it doesn’t matter what song it is; every time I go out and perform it, it’s like the first time I’m performing it, the first time I wrote it. If it’s not, then I’m not going to do it that night.
My daughter was two weeks old when I wrote ‘White Wine in the Sun.’ I can remember just sobbing and having to leave the room.
I wrote an article on a new Porsche for ‘Automobile Magazine.’ I knew the editor, and she asked me to write this article. So I’m more proud of that than anything.
The bands that wrote the big, heroic rock songs – I really wanted to make a record like that.
I said, other people can write songs, let’s see if I can. So the first 400 or 500 wound up on the floor somewhere. Then I wrote one called Melissa.
I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.
There have been times I’ve planted stuff in songs where four years later I’ll be singing it from a subconscious, kind of chameleon little lizard mind… and at a certain moment, all of a sudden, I’ll hear a line from a different vantage point and it’ll change its meaning. It’s something I wrote but it changed because I did.
Before trying a novel I wrote a couple of plays.
I had a notepad and I wrote down 30 things to make myself better just off the top of my head, and the next day I started to do that.
I know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship.
From the moment I wrote ‘Leaf Storm’ I realized I wanted to be a writer and that nobody could stop me and that the only thing left for me to do was to try to be the best writer in the world.
It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.
The first couple of pictures I wrote and directed were dreadful, because I was dealing in worlds that were not familiar to me, and writing about fantasy. They were just not anything I was really connected to.
Were there stories I wrote along the way that were terrible clinkers? God, yes. But they were all a product of their time, and I did the best I could.
I wrote my first song at 12 and remember someone asking, ‘What were you going through at 12 that you could write about?’ I get what you’re saying, but 11, 12, 13 were the hardest years of my life. You learn everything. You learn how horrible things feel.
I received a lot of complaints from parents who wrote and told me that their kids wouldn’t go to sleep until our show was over. So I went on the air and told all the children watching to ‘listen to their Uncle Miltie and go to bed right after the show.’
You know when I really realized like ‘wow’ what a gift this is was when I sang at camp and a girl wrote me a letter and said the song that I sung kept her from committing suicide.
I was just learning to play guitar when Tracy Chapman came out. She wrote these songs, she played them by herself and I so admired her for that.
My mother wrote a teen column for the South China Morning Post in the 1950s when she was growing up in Hong Kong. Her name was Lily Mark, but she sometimes wrote under her confirmation name, Margaret Mark. That was how she met my father.
I was separated from my wife at the time. A lot of people think I wrote it about prison.
I particularly admire are Mark Twain and Jerome K. Jerome who wrote in a certain tone of voice which was humane and understanding of humanity, but always ready to annotate its little foibles. I think I’d lay my cards down on that, and say that it’s that that I’m trying to do.
If you’ve become a huge act and you’re still doing the same music you wrote with your friends when you were making zero dollars, you’re lazy.
An English journalist called Michael Viney told me when I was 25, that I would write well if I cared a lot what I was writing about. That worked. I went home that day and wrote about parents not understanding their children as well as we teachers did, and it was published the very next week.
I was on ‘Murder She Wrote’ with Angela Lansbury. She was fantastic… she was lovely to everyone, she was always on time, prepared. Whereas when I worked with Bob Hope, he didn’t know his lines. He had to have these huge big cards… he hardly said two words to me all day.
I know people who have written big hit country songs that are really kind of terrible songs, but for the rest of their life, they’re the guy who wrote that. You’ve got to be careful; if you don’t want that to happen, don’t write those songs.
It was about 105 degrees in Chicago. And that’s a time when everybody gets tired. I came into the clubhouse, and everybody was sitting around, and I said, ‘Beautiful day. Let’s play two!’ And everybody looked at me like I was crazy. There were a couple of writers around, and they wrote that, and it stayed with me.
When I was 13 or 14, I took seven months off from touring. I did a lot of weekend gigs in Louisiana. We have fairs and festivals every weekend. But I took seven months off. That’s when I really started digging deep. I wrote a couple songs that year that I still play every now and then for people.
I wrote five issues of that and got the sack. Actually, they paid me for eight, but they changed their minds about the direction and threw three issues out the window.
So where a lot of people will spend three weeks on one song, I will write 10 in three weeks. Maybe the song that they sculpt is going to be as successful as just one of the 10 that I wrote.
