I feel like my songs are like diary entries for me. So I usually write about things that have happened to me specifically or sometimes it can be someone who’s close to me.
Is the modern social pattern of unending change and movement the cause of two modern diseases, insecurity and dissatisfaction? How lucky Thomas Hood was to be able to write, ‘I remember, I remember the house where I was born.’ I don’t even know what mine looked like!
Seven-11 is the pulse-beat of America. I think that Bruce Springsteen should do a song about a 7-11 in Asbury Park, New Jersey, but write it in such a way that American’s youth can identify and slurp along with the Boss. Hail the Boss! Hail 7-11!
I edit as I write and shoot. Any extra line, any pause that I know will get chopped on the editing table is done away with then and there.
You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
I don’t listen to what people say about me and I don’t read what they write about me. People can compare me to anyone they want to, but I’m not going to worry about it.
My biggest extravagances are also investments. I have several houses in California, a house in Nashville, an office complex, and I bought the old home place in Tennessee. They are different places for me to write, but I can turn right around and sell them.
It just happens I write fast and always have done.
A person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill.
A friend, Sean Cunningham, who went on to do ‘Friday the 13th,’ was given a small budget to produce a scary movie, and he told me to write something. I’d never seen a horror film in my life; I’d fallen in love with Fellini.
My stories often begin with a situation or character rather than an insight about the human condition. It’s always been difficult for me to write from an abstract idea, no matter how interesting or compelling I feel the idea might be.
As writers, we are sketching people all the time when we write fiction.
Half a century ago, the amazing courage of Rosa Parks, the visionary leadership of Martin Luther King, and the inspirational actions of the civil rights movement led politicians to write equality into the law and make real the promise of America for all her citizens.
It was my 16th birthday – my mom and dad gave me my Goya classical guitar that day. I sat down, wrote this song, and I just knew that that was the only thing I could ever really do – write songs and sing them to people.
We played some gigs in Switzerland a couple of weeks ago and it was the first time I really felt the group was really a band in the sense of something I could write for.
Here’s something I probably shouldn’t be saying: I never listen to my soundtrack albums because I can’t stand it. It’s just stereo. When I write, I write in surround. My life is in surround.
And it is a folly to try to craft a novel for the screen, to write a novel with a screen contract in mind.
When I was 21, I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for ‘The Simpsons’ who’d briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.
What you write on the page has nothing to do with when you’re on set. When you’re on set, it has nothing to do with when you’re in the editing room. And when you’re in the editing room, it has nothing to do with the final movie. You just have to let it go.
No one ever gets to write their ending, write their final script.
I don’t know the rules of grammar… If you’re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.
Sometimes I try to concentrate on the story I would like to write, and I realize that what interests me is something else entirely, or, rather, not anything precise but everything that does not fit in what I ought to write.
You don’t write a book to show off.
When people come to write about my period of office, I would be very happy if they say that I made a contribution to finding the happy medium again for the Germans.
My songs have always had hope and perseverance in them – I never write songs that have no escape hatch, no positivity.
I’m not everybody’s cup of tea. But sometimes criticism can be hurtful. Be respectful. I’m a good piano player, I can sing well, I write good songs. If you don’t like it, fair enough. But give me a break.
I write in the most classical French because this form is necessary for my novels: to translate the murky, floating, unsettling atmosphere I wanted them to have, I had to discipline it into the clearest, most traditional language possible.
Instead of slashing my wrists, I just write a bunch of really crummy songs.
Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.
People take the longest possible paths, digress to numerous dead ends, and make all kinds of mistakes. Then historians come along and write summaries of this messy, nonlinear process and make it appear like a simple, straight line.
From a building right in front of my windows, I can observe the speed of the sunrises and sunsets. The voices of children playing, laughing, yelling, and crying on the playground crawl up to the eighth floor, where I write. Their voices sound so innocent from a distance.
I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.
A wise man should so write (though in words understood by all men) that wise men only should be able to commend him.
I don’t write for children. I write and someone says it’s for children.
Even if I don’t release it myself, somebody else might hear it and want to record it. When you write a song, it gives it that potential.
I never try to convey a message, I just want to tell a story. Why that story in particular? I have no idea, but I have learned to surrender to the muse. I become obsessed with a theme or with certain stories; they haunt me for years, and finally, I write them.
Music is this divine thing, the closest that we can get to something divine. It’s like this instinct we all own, and some of us have found a way to hear that music and write it down and share it with people.
Coding is like writing, and we live in a time of the new industrial revolution. What’s happened is that maybe everybody knows how to use computers, like they know how to read, but they don’t know how to write.
Of course, relative citation frequencies are no measure of relative importance. Who has not aspired to write a paper so fundamental that very soon it is known to everyone and cited by no one?
For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.
I write on big yellow legal pads – ideas in outline form when I’m doing stand-up and stuff. It’s vivid that way. I can’t type it into an iPad – I think that would put a filter into the process.
As a country, we can’t teach kids how to read and write when we got 18 years to do it. And that’s – that’s a disgrace.
I’m not the ‘chosen one.’ I’m just one of many who have been given gifts. I can write. I can bloviate on TV. So I’m trying to use the gifts in a positive way. And I believe that’s all directed. And that’s why I’m here on the planet.
I hated being a novelist when I was 20 – I had nothing to write about.
You can write a great country record and still be angry. Who’s angrier than Toby Keith? He’s angrier than the average 10 rappers.
What’s that line from TS Eliot? To arrive at the place where you started, but to know it for the first time. I’m able to write about a breakup from a different place. Same brokenness. Same rock-bottom. But a little more informed, now I’m older. Thank God for growing up.
‘Boyz-n-the-Hood’ was actually supposed to be written for Eazy’s group. He had a group out in New York called Home Boys Only, called HBO. One of them looked like LL Cool J. Eazy wanted to write a song for them, a street song, like what we were doing on the mix tapes. So when I wrote it, it was too West Coast for them.
I’ll have to get people to write songs for me right now until my own writing comes around.
I was lucky because my mum was a teacher and showed me how to read and write. But most importantly, she encouraged me to use my imagination.
I never have my CNN off, it’s on the whole day. I don’t want to be out of range of television. I’m constantly bombarded by information – Somalia one second, Haiti the next – I need that constant pounding. I couldn’t write without television. I need to have the world in my room.
If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.
In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.
I like to think of my work and the way people approach it in the same way people approach a Lichtenstein painting. You can write a one-hundred-page dissertation about why he used comics. Or it could be like, ‘This is cute!’
I think private school is much better at customer service and making the parents feel better, especially in Los Angeles. It’s almost like a spa for the parents where you drop your kids off, where they give you a beautifully baked thing and let the parents write their own newsletter about global warming.
