I'll write for a while and then I'll find an appropriate song and in a weird way the music will keep me in the mood. I find music to define the mood of the movie, the rhythm the movie is going to play in.
I love thinking about things subtextually and I actually - like for instance when I write, I actually, I'm not very analytical about it. I don't ever deal with the subtext because I just know it's there so I don't have to deal with it. I just keep it about the scenario. I keep it on the surface, on my concerns. And one of the fun things is is when I'm done with everything, like now, for instance.
In polite society, there is such a thing as sensitivity to some issues, as time has gone on. There was a time when we weren't politically correct, at all, and we all wince at moments when we look to the past and see that. I don't really know what the answer is, as far as that is concerned. However, me, as an artist, I don't really think about it, at all. It actually is not my job to think about that, especially in terms of me, as a writer, but also as a filmmaker. I'm not worried about the filmmaking part because, if I'm writing it, that's what I'm going to do.
I've always equated the writing process with editing, sort of like when I get through editing the movie, that's like my last draft of the screenplay.
The thing we often forget to talk about, or perhaps we take for granted, is our country’s dazzling beauty. Our natural environment is so much a part of Australia’s art, writing, music and culture, both indigenous and non indigenous.
I wrote the first book, Harvest of Stars, and as I was writing it, I saw that certain implications had barely been touched on... It's perfectly obvious that two completely revolutionary things are going on, with cybernetics, and biological science.
The first law of history is to dread uttering a falsehood; the next is not to fear stating the truth; lastly, the historian's writings should be open to no suspicion of partiality or animosity.
The media only writes about the sinners and the scandals, he said, but that's normal, because 'a tree that falls makes more noise than a forest that grows.
I feel like when I'm writing for other people, when I'm doing rap hooks, it's kinda like playing dress up for me...
I can't imagine ever not making music, making albums, writing songs, doing shows. That's all I really know, and that's all I really do.
But once an original book has been written - and no more than one or two appear in a century - men of letters imitate it, in other words, they copy it so that hundreds of thousands of books are published on exactly the same theme, with slightly different titles and modified phraseology. This should be able to be achieved by apes, who are essentially imitators, provided, of course, that they are able to make use of language.
Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love.
I can never understand why people who have not seen me for a while ask if I am still writing. They might as well ask me if I am still breathing.
Nobody wanted me. I just kept writing books and learning my craft. Most writers aren't very good in the beginning.
There's only one good reason to be a writer-we can't help it! We'd all like to be rich, famous and successful, but if those are our goals, we're off on a wrong foot...I just wanted to earn enough money so I could work at home on my writing.
Ultimately, I think writing is a mixture of craft, inspiration, and being incredibly, courageously explorative with yourself - and being brutally honest, too.
The book really comes to life in the rewriting.
What I have in mind when I start to write could fit inside an acorn-an acorn, moreover, that rarely if ever grows into an oak. Write fiction and you relinquish reason. You start with an acorn and you end up with a mackerel.
Suicide is the role you write for yourself. You inhabit it and you enact it. All carefully staged -- where they will find you and how they will find you. But one performance only.
Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. the illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life.
Each book starts from ashes.
I don't know where my ideas come from, but I know where they come to. They come to my desk, and if I'm not there, they go away again.
I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.
Long before writing, people were telling each other stories and the audiobook goes all the way back to that tradition.
As Jane Austen might have put it: It is a truth universally acknowledged that young protagonists in search of adventure must ditch their parents.
