I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer.
When you write, you're always revealing a difficult part of yourself. It may not be a part of yourself that looks as difficult - there are parts that look more difficult - but in fact, they are all difficult, and you get kind of used to doing that. It is sort of the nature of the thing.
I'm older than my sister so I started writing first. I started writing at school. I was always top of my class in composition, essays, English Lit and all of that.
The hardest song to write is a protest song, a topical song with meaning.
My mother bought a piano, put it in the front room, and I just started writing my songs.
Dialogue is generally the worst choice for exposition. When you're writing lines you need to focus on the way people actually talk. And when we talk to each other we never actually explain our terms. We don't say 'Sweetheart, would you pass me the sugar bowl, which we picked up for a song at that antique stall in Munich.'
You know, as a writer, I'm more of a listener than a writer, cuz if I hear something I will write it down.
You know, I'm a total perfectionist, and I labor over trying to get things right. Whether we're putting together an opening for the Masters broadcast or when I was writing with my friend Eli Stillman a book about my dad called 'Always By My Side,' I'm always trying to find a way to do something better.
When I write, I strain with every wizened fibre of my weathered frame to analyze every possible angle of any given subject.
I write to please myself.
The exit from agony is always there. The tunnel out of the agony sector is always in front of you and yet you don't take it. You don't take it by choice. You want to indulge a lot and be in pain. The easiest way out is to write a list of what you're grateful for. If everybody literally did that before they went to bed at night, there'd be no unhappy people.
What makes a good writer of history is a guy who is suspicious. Suspicion marks the real difference between the man who wants to write honest history and the one who'd rather write a good story.
When I write, I lose time. I'm happy in a way that I have a hard time finding in real life. The intimacy between my brain and my fingers and my computer... Yet knowing that that intimacy will find an audience... It's very satisfying. It's like having the safety of being alone with the ego reward of being known.
When I'm writing, the romance is always the most important thing to me, but I really love adding in slices of real life, and for me that real life always includes animals.
Everything starts with writing. I heard Nikki Giovanni and was blown away. I just thought 'wow'; she was writing from a black girl's perspective, and the imagery was so vivid that I started doing spoken word.
There is nothing more important than writing well for the young, if literature is to have a continuance ... They will inherit the earth; and nothing that we value will endure in the world unless they can be persuaded to value it too.
I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device - recording and projecting.
Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying 'Listen to me'.
I got to draw monsters, robots and write funny stories. I loved doing that stuff and working with the actors. But it got to be less and less that stuff and more about trying to be everywhere and not being able to do one thing very enjoyably.
If you can write a character who is attractive but morally reprehensible, then you've got a character. It's got to feel like people I know and it doesn't just become a bag of tricks.
My informal writing style is a political choice, because I want feminism to be more accessible.
Sometimes I would write while inspired and sometimes I would write through sheer force of will, and in revision the writing that I thought was "dead" very frequently turned out to be better because it was more free of ego.
I don't think that if I had spent the time that I was in, say, Belgrade, writing about my time in Trieste, which is where I had just been, that would have been productive. I told myself: take extensive notes while you're there, do the research part of it, and then pray, pray, the muses will be available when the actual 'ready' happens.
When I decided to write about my brother and friends, I was attempting to answer the question why. Why did they all die like that? Why so many of them? Why so close together? Why were they all so young? Why, especially, in the kinds of places where we are from? Why would they all die back to back to back to back? I feel like I was writing my way towards an answer in the memoir.
I used to say, for me, writing was like walking a high wire, and heroin made me forget there was no net. Which is a fancy way of saying dope made me forget how shitty I felt for being on dope.
