The reaction to 'Aftermath' has been far worse than to 'A Life's Work,' yet I find I'm perhaps a little less touched by it. In both cases, I've coped artistically by believing the criticisms weren't right. They upset me, but they didn't challenge my understanding of how to write, nor of how morality functions in literature.
I'm sensitive about the criticism [for not producing new playwrights], yes. But I'm hip to it as well. I read 500 new plays a year, and 99. 99 percent of them are not good. I see no reason to do a new play just because it's new. It's like kissing your sister, a virtue, but so what? It seems to me more worthwhile to take a proven playwright and say, Write something for us.
There are certain topicks which are never exhausted. Of some images and sentiments the mind of man may be said to be enamoured; it meets them, however often they occur, with the same ardour which a lover feels at the sight of his mistress, and parts from them with the same regret when they can no longer be enjoyed.
Write a page a day. It will add up.
The music I was writing for 'Hamlet' needed to be very simple because there was so much going on with the dialogue in that play, so I felt like the music had to complement that - so that carried on through; I was working on the soundtrack and the album simultaneously.
In writing advertising it must always be kept in mind that the customer often knows more about the goods than the advertising writers because they have had experience in buying them.
"Diamonds & Rust" started off as another song. Then the words started to morph. When you write a song that deep, the words come from some place else. But when the songs stop coming, it would be so contrived to try and force it. Since then I've just been doing other people's music.
I wrote my first book when I was 22 years old. I have a way with words and I love to write. I can write without getting writers block so I knew, it was a gift.
Somebody said that writers are like otters. . . Otters, if they do a trick and you give them a fish, the next time they'll do a better trick or a different trick because they'd already done that one. And writers tend to be otters. Most of us get pretty bored doing the same trick. We've done it, so let's do something different.
A transition from an author's book to his conversation is too often like an entrance into a large city, after a distant prospect. Remotely, we see nothing but spires of temples and turrets of palaces, and imagine it the residence of splendour, grandeur, and magnificence; but when we have passed the gates, we find it perplexed with narrow passages, disgraced with despicable cottages, embarrassed with obstructions, and clouded with smoke.
In the course of writing a book I'll produce loads of pieces of paper to help the novel itself. Diagrams, charts, family trees. And at the end of each book I'll pack it all away. It takes me a while to do it - it's like a relationship that way; there's a period of letting - go, of grief, in a way - but then I box it up, label it, and put it in the attic.
When what we see catches us off guard, and when we write it as realistically and openly as possible, it offers hope. You look around and say, Wow, there's that same mockingbird; there's that woman in the red hat again. The woman in the red hat is about hope because she's in it up to her neck, too, yet every day she puts on that crazy red hat and walks to town.
I don't hold onto anything, because it's a waste of energy to do so, really. There's nothing that I can do about the way people want to write about me. I just try and concentrate on my work and do that as well as I can.
No sooner had I stepp'd into these pleasures Than I began to think of rhymes and measures: The air that floated by me seem'd to say 'Write! thou wilt never have a better day.
Sex and writing live on playful cruelties.
If you write a movie for Roger Corman, it's going to get made. You saw it almost the next day.
For myself, I haven't been content to carry on producing books that merely strain against the conventions - as I've grown older, and realised that there aren't that many books left for me to write, so I've become determined that they should be the fictive equivalent of ripping the damn corset off altogether and chucking it on the fire.
I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.
I was four or five, and my mother gave me a big black tablet, because I kept complaining that I was bored. She said, "Then write something. Then you can read it. " In fact, I had just learned to read, so this was a thrilling kind of moment. The idea that I could write something - and then read it!
I once had a crush on one of my teachers. I wrote him a love letter and stuck it in a bag in his office. I didn't write my name on it, but I'm sure he figured out it was me.