My father was a very special human being. He was brilliant in academics, sports and the arts. He wrote, performed and directed plays in English and Hindi/Urdu at his regiment.
Great dad. Yeah, he would ask me for money on birthdays and, you know, inappropriate times. And I just wrote him off like, ‘You’re not a father.’ I just learned you cannot emotionally invest in people who are not attainable.
It’s better for me to go up against someone’s passion with my passion and then clarifying something that he wrote. Then I know how to work around certain things.
I wrote things for the school’s newspaper, and – like all teenagers – I dabbled in poetry.
My first album after ‘American Idol’ I did with Desmond – we paid for it together, and we literally were together working on it every day for a year and half, just writing. We wrote in New York, Nashville, L.A., Sweden – we wrote with some other amazing songwriters like Diane Warren, too.
I guess if I wrote a book one day, it would be about hair.
From my anger, frustration, and hurt, I wrote the short story that would later become ‘The Hate U Give.’
I didn’t finish the stories until we went to the Philippines and I got malaria. I couldn’t work and I didn’t have any money, but I had seven stories. So I wrote three or four more.
I’d like just to be remembered as a guy that came along and did his music, did his best and showed up on time, clean and ready to do the job, wrote a few songs, and had a hell of a time.
The fact that people are already reading and loving something I wrote is still hard to believe.
My brother used to say that I wrote faster than he could read. He wrote two books – of poems – better than all mine put together.
I wrote it three times – with a Thesaurus.
Raymond Chandler once wrote that Dashiell Hammett gave murder back to the people who really committed it.
When I read Andrew Motion’s biography, I wept. It’s something about the purity of the story and how fresh it was because of the love letters Keats wrote.
‘Reign’ is probably the oldest one on the record. I wrote that when I was 19. ‘The Dead They Don’t Come Back,’ which is the last song on the album, I wrote when I was 20, and ‘Harlem River’ I just wrote last year. It spans from 2007 to 2012.
Of the 60 movies I wrote, more than half were written in two weeks or less.
When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.
I’m the guy who wrote The Authority Song. Did they think I was kidding? Did they think it was only a song to entertain?
I saw the Village as a place you could escape to, to express yourself. When I first went there, I wrote and performed poetry. Then I drew portraits for a couple of years. It took a while before I thought about picking up a guitar.
Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them.
I suppose I started writing seriously at 16 years old. I thought I wrote a novel at 16 and sent it to New York! They sent it back because it wasn’t novel.
So I wrote what I hoped would be science fiction, I was not at all sure if what I wrote would be acceptable even. But I don’t say that I consciously wrote with humour. Humour is a part of you that comes out.
The universe is a symphony of strings, and the mind of God that Einstein eloquently wrote about for thirty years would be cosmic music resonating through eleven-dimensional hyper space.
I wrote a script with my brother which ended up, somehow, on the Black List in 2008.
Historical fiction was not – and is not – meant to supplant literature from the period it describes. As a veteran of the Crimea, Tolstoy wrote ‘War and Peace’ to match his own internal sense of the truth of the Napoleonic wars, to dramatize what he felt literature from that period had failed to describe.
When you know your cast well and their strengths and weaknesses, you can start writing for them, just the way Shakespeare wrote for his actors.
I wrote ‘The Blue Sweater’ to inspire more people to become engaged in working to solve the problems of global poverty.
For me, being a writer was never a choice. I was born one. All through my childhood I wrote short stories and stuffed them in drawers. I wrote on everything. I didn’t do my homework so I could write.
I grew up – my dad, every time I was with my dad, he was always – not always, but he wrote. He’s a writer. So he was always in his office writing. He made a plan and, like, a point of, ‘This is my work. I’m going to do this every day for these amount of hours.’ So I think that’s where I got, like, a work sort of ethic.
I wrote my first books when I was single and then I got married and then had a kid and there were different things happening in my life.
I do want people to know that the songs that I wrote when I was with women were really about women. And the songs that I’ve written since have been fairly obvious about men.
English is taking over the world. I just wrote a piece about it. And it’s not by design. The United States dominates because it’s the biggest market.
The combination of pictures and words together can be really effective, and I began to realise in my career that unless I wrote my own words, then my message was diluted.
Me and my roommate wrote and directed a little short comedy called ‘The Elevator.’
I wrote my first play when I was nine. It was performed at Hampstead Theatre.
In the beginning, we had a great deal of freedom, and Jerry wrote completely out of his imagination – very, very freely. We even had no editorial supervision to speak of, because they were in such a rush to get the thing in before deadline. But later on we were restricted.
My poems – I don’t even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.
How do I let the director know how obsessed I am and willing to do anything for the movie? Like, I wanted to write this one director a letter, so I wrote him a handwritten note. But then I was like, ‘How many people are writing this guy handwritten letters? Is it going to seem cheesy? What do I do?’
Jim Morrison wrote the words for ‘Hello, I Love You’ when we were still in a band called Rick & the Ravens.
I personally never expected anything of Obama, and wrote about it before the 2008 primaries. I thought it was smoke and mirrors.
After spending three years of my life looking into this, I am more convinced than ever that the U.S. government’s responsibility for the drug problems in South Central Los Angeles and other inner cities is greater than I ever wrote in the newspaper.
I wrote ‘Kshana Kshanam’ with the one and only purpose of impressing Sridevi. ‘Kshana Kshanam’ was my love letter to her.
I wrote my graduate thesis at New York University on hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, so, for about two years, I read nothing but Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Chester Himes. I developed such a love for this kind of writing.
Climbing Mount Everest was the biggest mistake I’ve ever made in my life. I wish I’d never gone. I suffered for years of PTSD and still suffer from what happened. I’m glad I wrote a book about it. But, you know, if I could go back and relive my life, I would never have climbed Everest.
When we finally came to start work on this, the joy was it was only Joel and I, we didn’t have to answer to anybody, and we didn’t have to submit a screen play or anything like that. We just wrote it and then made it.
My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.
The songs are about things that we were thinking and we wrote ’em down, and when you listen to ’em, whatever you think it’s about… THAT’S what it’s about!
When I realized I wanted to do more writing and less traveling around the world teaching live seminars, I decided to write the first ‘Chicken Soup for the Soul(R)’ book. I knew I wanted to have 100 stories in the book, so I wrote or edited two stories a week for a year.
I wrote a lot of stuff quickly: pages and pages of notes that seemed pretty incoherent at first. Most of it was taken from the radio because -suddenly being a parent- I’d be confronted by the radio giving a news report every hour of the day.
When I was 5, my mother threw a party, and a friend and I wrote and performed a play called The Dutch Doll.
I wrote ‘Yellow Submarine’ for the Beatles. I wrote the screenplay for ‘The Games,’ about the Olympic Games. I wrote ‘Love Story,’ both the novel and the screenplay. I wrote ‘RPM’ for Stanley Kramer. Plus, I wrote two scholarly books and a 400-page translation from the Latin, and I dated June Wilkinson!
I wrote a novel about the combat experiences I didn’t have in Vietnam.
I have been called ‘The American De Maupassant.’ Well, I never wrote a filthy word in my life, and I don’t like to be compared to a filthy writer.
I wanted to be a classical actress. I plodded along. I went to junior college in San Francisco, I was in a Repertory Company. My hero was Eva Le Gallienne, who was a great theater actress at the turn of the century who created her own company, and she wrote these hilarious autobiographies at the time.
