"Stupid English. " "English isn't stupid," I say. "Well, my English teacher is. " He makes a face. "Mr. Franklin assigned an essay about our favorite subject, and I wanted to write about lunch, but he won't let me. " "Why not?" "He says lunch isn't a subject. " I glance at him. "It isn't. " "Well," Jacob says, "it's not a predicate, either. Shouldn't he know that?"
Maybe it goes without saying that if you want to become a famous writer before you’re dead, you’ll have to write something. But the folks in my classes with the biggest ideas and the best publicity shots ready to grace the back covers of their best-selling novels are also usually the ones who aren’t holding any paper.
As an editor, I must often tell writers that their stories "do not fit our present needs. " But there are times when I want to reply: "Sir, I would not trust you to write a ransom note. "
I just write what comes to me. I didn't sit down and say ok, here is my statement. It's just a song that has a shout out.
I write my miserable songs. I write songs about disgust and self-pity. We’re all going to have bummer moments. That’s not the stuff I choose to share.
In youth men are apt to write more wisely than they really know or feel; and the remainder of life may be not idly spent in realizing and convincing themselves of the wisdom which they uttered long ago.
Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.
And eventually as I kept writing it, something emerged that was not quite me but a version of me.
I started trying to write when I was in second or third grade.
Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth.
Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. That's how they learn to write. They take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read it over again until they understand how the writer moves, pauses, and sees. That's what being a lover is: stepping out of yourself, stepping into someone else's skin.
I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior FBI-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. . . . Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.
A little love has made me willingly study, preach, write, and even suffer.
I've had to try and find a way over the years of writing narratively that doesn't really require you to sit down and work out what the story's about. You're brought into a sort of sequence of images that have that emotional resonance, but it's kind of irrelevant what the actual story is. It's taken me maybe 13 albums or something to work that out.
It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.
The writing about what you know thing was a huge one. Not worrying so much about what people think. Just writing for myself and the band is enough.
There is no good writing; there is only good rewriting.
Writing has become my great joy - I simply love it.
I don't think I'm a great actress. I think I can act or I can react. Coming from a musical background and being a dramatic singer and writer, when I write stuff I really feel it. So I sing it like it comes from here. That's how I do the acting.
I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.
