You shouldn't say anything mean about people who can't read. You should write it instead.
As writers go, I have a skin of average thickness. I am pleased by a good review, disappointed by a bad. None of it penetrates far enough to influence the thing I write next.
The purpose of paragraphing is to give the reader a rest. The writer is saying. . . : Have you got that? If so, I'll go to the next point.
I love writing every song I can like a little mini movie. I like to have a character, or some characters, and really paint a picture with the song.
I used to always throw in random questions. I'd have to ask about artist's single and their writing process, which I know is every artist's most-hated question, like, "Well what was ,your process?" And it's. like, "Well, I wrote this album. " And then at the end I would throw in, like, "So, Seinfeld or Simpsons?" and they'd be so thrown, because everything else could be autopilot. All my greatest moments were from the most sporadic questions.
I write the script; nobody sees it, not the people that put the money in the picture. I cast who I want, and make the film. That's why I've always felt the only thing standing between me and greatness, is me. There's no excuse for me not to be great except that I'm not.
I fell into lyric writing because of music. I backed into it.
A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words.
Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.
For a while the creative writing community sort of sprung out of places like Iowa and Syracuse. The graduates sort of went out, and they would found creative writing departments in the little colleges where they went, and then some of those would found other ones. I mean every college has got a creative writing department, so where are the jobs coming from? There are not any jobs out there.
Writing is. . . . being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.
Soberity makes me write dull songs about reorganizing the knick knacks in my house.
I cannot write music. I cannot play the piano.
A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another's shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy.
Good writing will bring you to places you don't even expect sometimes.
I sing songs that I have lived or I write them because I have lived them. I think the believability factor is key.
There's lots of different ways of writing stuff and lots of different mindsets to have, but I think when it's your own creation, it's more pleasurable because you have total control.
Place is character. And all writing is regional.
You have to be an outsider to write.