Sometimes I'll ask the book writer to write a monologue, not to be performed, just as if they were notes for the character.
I really don't want to write a score until the whole show is cast and staged.
I don't write songs apart from theatrical pieces. I'm not interested in writing songs qua songs.
Everyone would like to be on Broadway, cause if a show works, you make a great deal of money and it allows you to write other shows.
I never want to write something until I know every scene in the movie. I don't want someone hiring me and then me not being able to write it. Which is always a fear. So I like to figure it out, know all the characters, and know almost every scene in the movie before I start writing.
I don't know how much a photograph can add to a biography, the way a film or writing or narrative medium could. Because it's a frozen image.
I don't aspire to direct like many actors. I would aspire most likely to do some writing, but I haven't had a chance to do that.
When I get hired as an actor as opposed to a writer, one of things that's exciting for me is doing stuff I wouldn't normally do myself. So whether it's a kid's movie or a voice in animation or in this case - where I just get to be silly, it's a different kind of comedy for me. As a performer, it's a different pleasure than when you're writing or directing. As a performer, you're just in the hands of the director and you go with whatever they want to do.
I've lost my writing skills since college. I couldn't write a book. It would take a long time.
I did some writing. I was just taking the kids to school. I did a couple things and we did some tours. It was a lot of downtime.
The best I do, if I'm just playing around and riffing in a fantasy world, and then I'll write something down. Hopefully I write it down.
I feel the most natural thing is for music to come that way because it's sort of like poetry. Though I do think with poets that I like, like Charles Olson or Ezra Pound, they were rewriting constantly, until the poem becomes a diamond.But with music I don't really feel that way.
The narrative songs were well-written, like an article in The New Yorker. They're nice and pat. They're more like I'm just showing I can do that when I write a song like that. It's not my true calling.
With lyrics for me, it's usually musically-based. It's not really poetry- or writer-based. It's rock-based. It doesn't mean that I'm aping rock lyrics, but I'm writing from a music standpoint. I'm thinking more of music heroes, if they're in my mind. Not William Blake or John Ashbury. Sometimes maybe I thought of him a little bit. Or Wallace Stevens. I don't even really fully understand either of them.
I'd like to ghost-write Liz Phair's novel. But I don't really know about that. It seems like a dignified thing to segue into as I approach the other side of 45. My hands are just full right now. There's the potential to try to write some kind of biography of Pavement - sort of a cryptic, nonfiction/fiction blowout. The story's never been told well. But that's a lot of inward-gazing that I'm not sure I want to do. I like to look out.
Which isn't the truth, you understand. At least you understand that in your head...but not always in your heart.
The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far in between. Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.
Acting can be a very reactive profession. Acting is a fantastic thing, and it's my life, but writing is also part of me too, so I did it and in so doing took responsibility for my own life.
I find it hard to think of myself as selling books. I don't even have a Web site. I want to sit and write, not sell.
So much emotion goes into writing fiction.
When I gave up dope and alcohol, my immediate feeling was 'I've saved my life, but there'll be a price because I'll have nothing that buzzes me any more'. But I enjoyed my kids. My wife loved me and I loved her. And eventually the writing came back and I discovered that the writing was enough. Stupid thing is that probably it always had been.
I wanted to write a balls-to-the-wall supernatural horror story, something I haven't done in a long time.
What really scares me is Alzheimer's or premature senility, losing that ability to read and enjoy and to write. And you do it, and some days maybe aren't so good, and then some days, you really catch a wave, and it's as good as it ever was.
Hemingway sucks. If I set out to write that way, it would have been been hollow and lifeless because it wasn't me.
It was always a pleasure to write. I can never think of a time when I just hacked something out to fulfil a contract or meet a deadline. I might have hacked things out, but it was always stuff I loved.
