Beware of self-indulgence. The romance surrounding the writing profession carries several myths: that one must suffer in order to be creative; that one must be cantankerous and objectionable in order to be bright; that ego is paramount over skill; that one can rise to a level from which one can tell the reader to go to hell. These myths, if believed, can ruin you. If you believe you can make a living as a writer, you already have enough ego.
I would normally never set out to write a trilogy.
If you have other things in your life-family, friends, good productive day work-these can interact with your writing and the sum will be all the richer.
I think it all comes back to being very selfish as an artist. I mean, I really do just write and record what interests me and I do approach the stage shows in much the same way.
I don't like people probing into my life, so I reveal as little as possible or lie about it as much as need be so as to give them something to write about.
What I do is I write mainly about very personal and rather lonely feelings, and I explore them in a different way each time. You know, what I do is not terribly intellectual. I'm a pop singer for Christ's sake. As a person, I'm fairly uncomplicated.
All the characters on the album are inside me, though none are me. They are sides of me or who I was.
It's somewhat of a contradiction, .. I guess the quieter the voice, the more necessary it is to push it. It's not going to leap out at you and scream. I also can't control how a book is marketed. To say the book marketing is aggressive, fine, I'm happy with that. Push the book. That doesn't mean that my personality or writing style changes.
A certain luxury when you get to writing a novel is to have the space to have your characters just banter.
Allen Ginsberg was a world authority on the writing of William Blake, and had an incredible knowledge of classic literature and world politics.
I like to co-author books to learn from those I write with.
For me, in songwriting, I have a route I can take. Maybe there's some forks, I can go this way, this way. But I know those roads. I still have the experience behind me.
My songwriting is like extending a hand to the listener.
With these Funny or Die videos, I do everything for them. I write them, act in them, and co-direct them with my buddy Brian McGinn, who I grew up with. We also edit them together. We're working on a small scale of Internet videos, but we're slowly trying to make them become a bigger thing.
With humor you have so many options with topics and length, I mean I can write humor essays in books now and they can be as long as I want them to be.
I was 12 or 13 years old. So I started to write poetry and fiction, even though I was really into biology because my dad was a science teacher. I kept writing all those years.
Every religion ... has rituals, practices, holy writings or traditions, etc. Nothing like that has ever developed from Atheism. There are no holy men, holidays or holy books and no agreed-upon canons of faith. In fact, the only thing you can get some Atheists to agree upon is that there is no god.
I had all these sparkles I'd collected and wanted to work in, but when I originally started writing it and it was originally this novel about all these people set in 1666, what I was so interested in was the New Science.
I was coming back from Tel Aviv recently, and we had forty minutes of bumps. I got so scared I grabbed a paper and pen and put them in my pocket, just in case we crashed and I needed to write a letter from wherever we landed.
I hope we find a cure for every major disease, because I'm tired of walking 5K. I'm pretty sure I don't have to sweat for cancer. I'll write a check.
I see myself doing Harry Potter films as long as I'm enjoying it and as long as they are going to challenge me as an actor. I want to be an actor - it's my aspiration - so I want to do other films. I want to write something and I want to direct something!
For me, you go to university to meet lots of different people from different backgrounds. I think that's one of the most important things you get there. And you also get some sense of direction regarding what you want to do when you leave. I sort of know what I want to do in my life - I want to act and ultimately I'd like to write. And in terms of meeting people from different backgrounds, that's what you get on a film set. So the two most valuable things that university would have given me I've sort of achieved by being on a film set.
Most beginning writers - and I was the same - are like chefs trying to cook great dishes that they've never tasted themselves. How can you make a great - or even an adequate - bouillabaisse if you've never had any? If you don't really understand why people read mysteries - or romances or literary novels or thrillers or whatever - then there's no way in the world you're going to write one that anyone wants to publish. This is the meaning of the well-known expression "Write what you know."
I imagine a child. That child is me. I can reconstruct and vividly remember portions of my own childhood. I can see, taste, smell, feel, and hear them. Then what I do is, not write about that kid or about his world, but start to think of a book that would have pleased him.
That the Op-Ed page is very important in readers' and the nation's perception of the Times, the perception of its editorial positions, and of its implicit editorial positions as expressed by the publisher's choice of people who are given the freedom to write opinion columns.
