A pen connects you to the paper. It definitely matters.
I thought you'd be arguing [in the law school], and then I realized you have to read all these cases, and it's mostly writing, and then I just thought, "Well, I might as well stay and get the degree. "
I consider myself to be first and foremost a comic writer. The way I entertain myself - especially in those long and grim hours in the office - is to write stuff I find funny.
Everyone wants to write a book. Very few people are able to do it.
Always compare yourself to the best. Even if you never measure up, it can't help but make you better.
What keeps me motivated to create new music is the joy of songwriting. The joy of being creative. The joy of writing a poem or essay. Writing anything. I just love writing, whether it is music or words. I just didn't need to share it for the last 18 years. When you share it, it brings on other things, which is good.
I am asked to submit a 2-3 page synopsis to my publisher ahead of time, so by the time I begin writing, I have a fair idea of where the story will begin, the main conflicts, and the basic ending point. But that still leaves plenty of room for changes and discovery along the way.
I didn't start out writing to give children hope, but I'm glad some of them found it.
We can't talk about the book [Albert Camus] wanted to write because we have barely its beginnings. He had written hardly any of it, but he needed to write it. It seems to me that if you look at the style of The First Man it conforms much more to who he was as a man, it resembles him very closely.
If you're writing a screenplay from scratch, it involves a lot of creation. In this play, I had a strong main character and it involved some creation around him. That's what I like about adapting that particular play because I added some maneuvering space as a scriptwriter to invent my own things.
You can't say, I won't write today because that excuse will extend into several days, then several months, then. . . you are not a writer anymore, just someone who dreams about being a writer.
If you text 'I love you' and the person writes back an emoji - no matter what that emoji is, they don't love you back.
If something pops in my mind and it's easy, I write it.
To write you must be warm, fed, loved and sober.
It sounds shameful, but on my best days I write only about three or four hours.
[Ernest ]Hemingway always said, "Write about what you know. " I think you can do that, and if you want to write about what you don't know, you can. It just takes a lot more work.
You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.
Write as well as you can and finish what you start.
Anyone should be very suspicious of a sentence he's written that can't be read aloud easily.
I was just on the edge of getting married, and I was frenzied at the prospect of this great step in my life after having been a bachelor for so long. And I really wanted to take my mind off of the agony, and so I decided to sit down and write a book.
