I wrote ‘Aadukalam’ keeping Dhanush in mind. As an actor, he delivers exactly what I need and sometimes more.
When I wrote ‘East,’ I wanted a completely earthy, very sexy, very violent play, so I wrote in verse. I found it not only satisfying but releasing. It gave me an opportunity to play with language. We never played the characters like the yobs that they are, but rather in a slightly heightened way.
I had gone to New York with no plan at all. I did a lot of jobs – barman, teacher, security guard, postman and construction worker – and I was meeting many eccentric characters, and they were saying funny things, which I always wrote down.
I wrote in my book, ‘unPlanned,’ about a church that kicked me out when they found out that I worked for Planned Parenthood. I often get questioned about that, whether I still think they made the wrong decision. My answer is a resounding ‘Yes.’
For example, after developing a sound similar to an elephant trumpeting, I wrote the song Elephant Talk which gave my elephant sound an appropriate place to live.
This was in June, 1866. Frank wrote for me to come to him at once, and although my own wound was still very bad, I started immediately and stayed with him at the house of Mr. Alexander Severe, in Nelson county, until he recovered, which was in September.
Although a madman, Norton wrote letters to Abraham Lincoln and Queen Victoria which they took seriously.
Then you start another book and suddenly the galley proofs of the last one come in and you have to wrench your attention away from what you’re writing and try to remember what you were thinking when you wrote the previous one.
We just wrote songs that seemed good to us. We wrote the album in like two weeks. We could have had more time, but we accomplished what we needed to in the two weeks.
The idea that I wrote something that stood for the way I feel about things, and that it lasts, that’s probably my favorite thing that I’ve done.
I wrote the worst novel ever.
The day Guy Clark passed away was the day we wrote ‘Girl Goin’ Nowhere.’ It was the first day I had met Jeremy Bussey, who I wrote the song with.
The original Return of the Living Dead, I was attached to direct it, and I wrote the story. Production was delayed. In the meantime I went to London to do Lifeforce.
I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex.
I got a song called ‘All That I Got Is You.’ I wrote that from the heart.
But the law of God came from heaven indeed. God wrote it with his finger, it is the fountain of all wisdom, and therefore shall it continue for ever, and never have an end.
I don’t really have a writing process. I don’t write at all but, honestly, I feel like it’s a modern-day writing because everything is technology and if I go in there and freestyle and I keep it, I feel like I wrote that. If I go in there and fix it, it’s almost like something I wrote.
Most people believe that the Creator of the universe wrote (or dictated) one of their books. Unfortunately, there are many books that pretend to divine authorship, and each makes incompatible claims about how we all must live.
I had a friend who worked at a hospice, and he said people in their final moments don’t discuss their successes, awards or what books they wrote or what they accomplished. They only talk about their loves and their regrets, and I think that’s very telling.
If you’re writing an opinion piece, it’s your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions.
I knew at the time that that wasn’t the part I would be doing, they just wanted a screentest so they could have a look at it to show to the directors and producers. Then they wrote a part for me or maybe they already had it in mind, I don’t know.
All my life, I have taken inventory at intervals. For example, when I became a movie actor and suddenly I had to deal with fame, money and playing so many roles, I lost myself. I said, ‘Who am I?’ And I wrote my first book to deal with that, ‘The Ragman’s Son.’
Mike Campbell and Don Henley and I wrote ‘The Heart of the Matter,’ which was a huge hit for Don.
No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.
Larry only ever wrote one song, and he wrote that with Tony Kaye, I think it was, from Yes.
Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.
Gunna ain’t never wrote no song for me. He just showed me how to rap.
If I ever wrote a book on preaching, it would contain three words: Preach the Word. Get rid of all the other stuff that gets you sidetracked; preach the Word.
When I was 18 years old I went to Shakespeare Company, the school, and I wrote a poem about my leaves – I felt like a tree that had no leaves. That is the life at 18.
I’m sure you’re aware, with the time it takes to put these books together, everything can suddenly start coming out at once even though I wrote anything between one and five years ago.
I could write songs about politics, but I’m conscious of not writing songs that sound the same as the ones I wrote 30 years ago.
‘Sit Here and Cry’ was one of the first songs I wrote with that overdramatic sarcastic dry sense of humor, which is why the energy of the song doesn’t necessarily reflect the subject matter.
I’m a strong nonbeliever in the Christmas letter where you don’t really read it because it’s just full of kind of meaningless information. It doesn’t really resonate to the person reading it, but it means so much to the person that wrote it.
I’m an actor who they said was wrinkled and balding and everything else when I was in my early 30’s. Most of the people who wrote that who thought they were younger than me are now bald and wrinkled.
You don’t think it was because a white man wrote it, a black man wrote it, a green man wrote it. What – doesn’t make a difference! Doesn’t make a difference. I think he did a good job.
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
I wrote ‘My Teeth Hurt’ in April 2018 when my teeth hurt and I didn’t have dental insurance.
Capote wrote every day. He said that’s the only way, you have to sit down every day and do it.
What is a seemingly conservative Englishman doing, leading the world in the mastery of a classically Spanish instrument? Debussy wrote some of the best Spanish music, and the only time he was ever in the country, he saw a bullfight which made him ill.
The tune ‘All My Friends,’ we recorded because our friend who wrote the song, Scott Boyer, passed way, and Gregg Allman had passed and he had recorded the song on his first solo record.
TV’s hard work. I don’t know how the hell Angela Lansbury survived doing ‘Murder, She Wrote’ all those years. And sure, everyone wants to be Bruce Willis or George Clooney – they want to be in film for the range of characters you get to play.
Mozart often wrote to his family that certain variations or sections of pieces were so successful that they had to be encored immediately, even without waiting for the entire piece to end.
Back in high school, I wrote a novel about a character named Bart Simpson. I thought it was a very unusual name for a kid at the time. I had this idea of an angry father yelling ‘Bart,’ and Bart sounds kind of like bark – like a barking dog.
People are quite shocked when you remind them that Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra never wrote a song that they recorded in their lives, as far as I know.
Right before I got ‘Sons of Anarchy,’ I actually quit acting for 18 months and didn’t read a single script, and I wrote a film. I felt like I needed to do something that I had control over, as an artist, and also just do something where I felt like I had some control over my life, as just a human, out in the world.
People like that I wrote a book – that’s cute, but oh, making a business out of it? That’s not nice.
I wrote my first textbook in 1970. It was called ‘The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy,’ and over the years, many students told me that they enjoyed reading it because there were so many stories in there; often just a paragraph or a page of something that happened in a group session.
I wrote Murder at the Windmill. And it was accepted and we made it and it was the first film I made with Danny Angel, well the only film I actually made… I made a lot of it at the Windmill itself.
Well just meeting J. K. Rowling was amazing because she created all this world. And all the fans, we all get so obsessed with it and then you met the one person who made it all up. It was just so amazing. And I was just so amazed that that she wrote this book and all of the films have happened.
I’ve known those pieces ever since I was about 16 or 17; I also at that time was taken to meet Charles Ives whom I got to know fairly well. He was the one who wrote a recommendation for me to get into college.
Well, if I am not vulgar, neither is my book. I wrote myself. Suggestiveness is always vulgar. But truth never. My book is not even remotely suggestive. I call things by their names. That is all.
