I never write a book unless I can't help it. Something has to bother me, like a mosquito, until I have to do something to relieve the itch.
The weirdest thing to me is that magazines would never do this for their writers. They would never hire a writer who writes for another magazine; they want to have their own stable of writers. Newsweek would never hire a TIME writer, and TIME would never hire a Newsweek writer - but they would both hire the same photographer to shoot a cover for them.
I was interested in writing a child's understanding of a cataclysmic event - something experienced in fragments, whispers, viewed from around corners - and it seemed to me a child would try to understand it through stories and games, which distort and change the experience, then become the experience.
I'm sensitive about the criticism [for not producing new playwrights], yes. But I'm hip to it as well. I read 500 new plays a year, and 99.99 percent of them are not good. I see no reason to do a new play just because it's new. It's like kissing your sister, a virtue, but so what? It seems to me more worthwhile to take a proven playwright and say, Write something for us.
The fascination with the music stayed with me for years and I wanted to find out why I liked it so much and to learn the grammar of it, and that's why I tried to write the sheet music down. Writing it down gave me some ideas of other versions of the music and I wrote the first string quartets and piano pieces based on transcriptions.
For what I wrote that started this whole controversy, I deserved to be criticized, and I felt bad about writing it. I felt bad mainly as a writer and a thinker.
Years passed and I hadn't really done much writing. Other than the fact that I'm constantly developing new shows, writing up proposals and stuff.
I had co-written one episode of an animated show called Jem and the Holograms. Which at the time I didn't view as the start of a career, I viewed it as, "Hey, someone wants to pay me to write something, and I might get a TV credit, isn't that cool?" So I did it with my writing partner at the time, Cary Bates, and it was interesting but it didn't lead to anything and I didn't think too much about it.
First and foremost, that's what I am, I'm a writer. I can't draw worth a darn. I don't draw, I write.
When it's time to write a new song, anything that you thought you understood last time is pretty much pulverized.
I've found that writing and playing music has so little to do with will, and so much to do with just finding what's there waiting for you.
Look, I like gritty. I write gritty. There is a time and a place for gritty. I'll take my Batman gritty, thank you, and I will acknowledge that such a portrayal means that my 11-year-old has to wait before he sees The Dark Knight. But if Hollywood turns out a Superman movie that I can't take him to? They've done something wrong.
I've been co-writing a TV thing with Bryan Cranston, which we are going to find out soon if it's moving forward or not which is for Amazon.
I talked about the summer of 1985, when I worked at an amusement park on Long Island, the kind of place where someone would pull a knife on you if they wanted a better prize than you were giving them. You found a lot of used needles beside the cotton-candy cart at the end of the night. It was a pretty white-trash, scary place. It was one in a series of terrible jobs I've had, coming from not much money and having no particularly resourceful skills. And at one point one of my friends, a writer on the show, Jenny Konner, said, "You should write about that."
I was naïve when I was young, I was sheltered. I had illusions about who I was going to be, delusions, and a little bit of pretentiousness. And I thought, "I'll write the guy like that. It'll allow me to make fun of everyone else if I make fun of myself."
It actually took me 20 years to want to write about my youth. I was definitely always a little intimidated about writing about that part of my life.
Sometimes you have to grit your teeth and remain tenacious and just believe the end will come. Other times it's not an issue. You just write on and the end comes naturally.
I couldn't say there is a formula to songwriting. Each time is a unique experience.
I continue to write. It's just one of those things that I do. I'll have periods when I write and periods when I don't. But you don't want it to become a discipline really. If it becomes a discipline, it becomes a chore and that's no good.
Songwriting is never one thing. I've spent as long as three months writing a song. Other times I've done it in twenty minutes.
I have not written a perfect sentence, in the literary sense. It's a lot easier to throw a perfect pass than to write a perfect sentence, if that sentence is meant to perform more than a mechanical function.
I was, throughout school, in the theater program. Through elementary school, junior high, high school, and then J.J. Abrams, my closest friend in the world, we were living together. He was writing, and I was trying writing; I wasnt getting paid for it like he was, but I always had the acting bug.
My father told me when I first started that standup is exciting and I should pursue it, but that writing would be the thing that would give me power over my career. I never have to take a road gig or a writing gig I don't want because I always have the ability to play one against the other.
It's an amazingly consistent thing with Irish people. We will talk to strangers at parties for hours. It's what we were bred to do I think. And the Jewish people were bred to write the stuff that we say.
I've been taking longer to write stories lately.
