I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.
Anybody who writes doesn't like to be misunderstood.
All I write about is what's happened to me and to people I know, and the better I know them, the more likely they are to be written about.
I used to teach writing in a federal prison, and for my students' benefit, I would liken the narrative use of this highly personal point of view to a boxer's getting in close to his opponent.
I had hoped to be a poet, and for a long time I tried to write poetry. My first published pieces were poems.
I find it only natural for a storyteller to be interested in storytelling and, for anyone who spends the better part of his or her life writing fiction, it is hardly surprising that the pleasures, worries, and mechanics of fiction-making should enter the work.
In nearly everything I write, I am like a ventriloquist, throwing my voice into my characters, animating them by the slightest twitch as I register my anxieties and alarms. This is true even in my comedies.
Each piece of writing I undertake, whether a story, novel, play, or poem, begins with an image.
I tell myself that, regardless of what source I draw on, I'm writing a new work for reasons peculiar to me and not an adaptation, and so feel, in the end, justified in singing it my way.
I do believe we are actors in our own dramas, which, moment by moment, we ourselves write; that we are characters in our own fictions or those devised for us by someone or something else.
My fondness for extended monologue might have been encouraged by two decades of writing stage and radio dramas.
Because of an instability at my own core, it comforts me to live, fixed, within a story. If reading is our consolation for having been allotted only one life, I find that writing oneself into a fictional world is even more comforting.
I was writing for live television. And I said to myself, someday, soon as I can, I have got to do a situation comedy.
I got a call from an agent to come to New York City, and write for the 'Ford Star Revue.' Because at the time there wasn't much 'national television'.
Stand-up has the best writers, because it's the hardest writing by a million miles.
I love writing - it's the best. But I really hate collaboration.
I actually write more on guitar than I do on piano.
Songwriting is something I really need to work on. I don't have very many songs but I really love it. I would love to be a great song writer some day.
Songs are kind of alive, I think; once you finish writing them, that doesn't mean that that's it for the song. It can have its own little life, I think.
Writing is something that I am ever driven to do, and concerning which I am never satisfied.
I was most confusedly in love. ... Even though I resolved not to think of him, his face would keep appearing between me and a book I tried to read, or his voice would suddenly sound instead of the words I tried to write on a page. ... I found love annoying and uncomfortable, like fetters, until I got used to it.
I always thought everybody made up stories in their heads - never thought about actually writing them down on paper until I was snowed in with the kids in the blizzard of '79 - 3 feet of snow. I live in a rural area and was stuck. No morning kindergarten - it was a nightmare.
So, you’re hitting on Clare the Fair.” “I’m not hitting on her. I’m exploring the possibility of seeing her on social terms.” “He’s hitting on her,” Owen said around a mouthful of chips. “You’ve still got that thing you had for her back in high school. Are you still writing bad song lyrics about heartbreak?” “Suck me. And they weren’t that bad.” “Yeah, they were,” Ryder disagreed. “But at least now we don’t have to listen to you playing your keyboard and howling them down the hall.
A writer never finds the time to write. A writer makes it. If you don't have the drive, the discipline, and the desire, then you can have all the talent in the world, and you aren't going to finish a book.
I write every day. Even if I'm not writing well, I write through it. I can fix a bad page. I can't fix a blank one.
