Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.
What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
All the songs I write are about human dynamics, whether it’s with girlfriends, boyfriends, or family.
To overcome poverty and the flaws of the economic crisis in our society, we need to envision our social life. We have to free our mind, imagine what has never happened before and write social fiction. We need to imagine things to make them happen. If you don’t imagine, it will never happen.
You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.
People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children’s book. I say, ‘If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children’s book’, but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you’re directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.
I don’t go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it’s contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me.
Somebody said to me, ‘But the Beatles were anti-materialistic.’ That’s a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, ‘Now, let’s write a swimming pool.’
It came about as follows: over the years when I was involved in dianetics, I wrote the beginnings of many stories. I would get an idea, and then write the beginning, and then never touch it again.
If I inherited a billion dollars and didn’t have to work ever again, what would I do to fill my day? I’d paint, I’d write jokes and stories, and I’d hang out and chat to very interesting people.
Although, my experience when I’ve been depressed, not only am I too depressed to sit down and write a song, I’m too depressed to pick up my feet. So if you can at least write about it, you’re halfway away from it.
It is humiliating to remain with our hands folded while others write history. It matters little who wins. To make a people great it is necessary to send them to battle even if you have to kick them in the pants. That is what I shall do.
If ever I was feeling down I would go and write something. It’s a form of escape.
If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.
God understands more about the financial markets than many who write about them.
Anytime I have to write down what I do, I write yoga instructor. That’s what I do. My thing is yoga.
Respect the language in which you write. Be kind, develop good vocabulary, and be creative in writing beautiful sentences. Your prose should be your poetry when you write.
The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.
I’m like a bad musical cliche because I bring my guitar on the road and try to write songs in hotel rooms.
I’m a composer. I know nothing about money and commercial stuff. I just write music.
I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
The pen is mightier than the sword, and considerably easier to write with.
It’s hard to write haiku. I write long, silly Indian poems.
Life is God’s novel. Let him write it.
I’ve always had a fantasy to write a cookbook, because everyone wants to know what a model eats.
Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
John Wells let me write a couple of West Wings, which was an incredible gift. I loved it once I got past the brain injury part of it, and so I’m working on a couple of things that are far from fruition, but what I want to pursue.
Compared with other Indian film composers, I only write about six movies a year. Others write up to 60.
I won’t say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like: What I’m going to be if I grow up.
My sister Tiffany told me years ago, ‘You can never write about me.’ Then she called six months ago and said she wanted to be in a story. She was worried people thought I didn’t like her.
In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.
Life’s like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending.
I don’t write; I just go in the booth.
What you write sets the visual style for the film. But you have to compromise your style in your first few films before people let you do what you want to do.
I am bipolar, and I am proud. And that is why I wanted to write a book. To shine a light on mental illness, to be vulnerable about the days I let it take control and paid dearly for it, and to tell anyone fighting a similar battle: You are not alone. You are not broken.
Writing a play to get to Broadway and have a national tour is a sure way to write a terrible, terrible play.
Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books.
As a kid, I said, ‘I want to write for movies.’ When I finally had that opportunity it was like I was able to exhale. ‘Wow, I’m finally doing this for real.’
‘The Immigrant Story,’ which took me about twenty-five years to write, was a very simple story, but I couldn’t think of how to tell it. Then twenty years after I started it, I found this one page and realized it was going to be the story. That’s the only way you get it sometimes.
One of the disadvantages of poetry over popular music is that if you write a pop song, it naturally gets into people’s heads as they listen in the car. You don’t have to memorize a Paul Simon song; it’s just in your head, and you can sing along. With a poem, you have to will yourself to memorize it.
I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It’s totally for myself. I never in my wildest dreams expected this popularity.
I tell you, gospel music is very uplifting. It’s great. It’s just a lot of fun to write, and it’s wonderful for the heart, soul, mind, and spirit. It’s just great.
Some critics will write ‘Maya Angelou is a natural writer’ – which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.
I didn’t do anything but write for six months after I got my publishing deal. That was just trying to get better and figure out my sound and the way I like to do it.
The heart and soul of good writing is research; you should write not what you know but what you can find out about.
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
I write from my soul. This is the reason that critics don’t hurt me, because it is me. If it was not me, if I was pretending to be someone else, then this could unbalance my world, but I know who I am.
In the beginning, I was a stay-at-home dad. So I could actually focus on being a rapper. I could write. I could come up with ideas.
The desire to write grows with writing.
The great mass of humanity should never learn to read or write.
There was a recording studio in my school, and I knew this kid who had a key, so I’d write lyrics in school while I was in class, and then, in a 10-minute break, I recorded the song ‘Hurt’ in one go at the school studio.
I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.
I was born into Sudan’s civil war, and before I could read or write, I was using an AK47 in the conflict between the Muslim north and Animist/Christian south over the land and natural resources.
Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.
I sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, not to make them American. Iraqis will write their own history and find their own way.
But the ultimate lesson is just sit down and write. That’s all.
I write in Urdu and everything is written by my hand.
Some people play the piano, some do Sudoku, some watch television, some people go out to dinner parties. I write books.
It wasn’t books that inspired me to write. For me, inspiration was simple, immediate: I got it from eating, dancing, talking. I got it from life lived, things touched, from sensuality, from love of life, from our irrefutable connection to the earth.
A song like ‘Heartbreaker,’ it’s a song about learning – it’s not necessarily a song about heartbreak. It’s more than that. We write those songs to relive how we got over something.
My job is to write opinions. I decide cases and write opinions. It is not to respond to idiocy and critics who make statements that are unfounded. That doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t have constructive criticisms, but it should be constructive.
My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.
Anytime you write something, you go through so many phases. You go through the ‘I’m a Fraud’ phase. You go through the ‘I’ll Never Finish’ phase. And every once in a while you think, ‘What if I actually have created what I set out to create, and it’s received as such?’
