'E. T. ' began with me trying to write a story about my parents' divorce.
I write to the beat and let life play the guitar strings
When there's writing that you really trust, it's very freeing as an artist.
There are still songs that I'm writing. I like to write. I like to take a long time to do my songs, not even the actual writing process, but conceptualizing, getting into the songs. That's why I stopped doing mixtapes.
I think of you often. Especially in the evenings, when I am on the balcony and it’s too dark to write or to do anything but wait for the stars. A time I love. One feels half disembodied, sitting like a shadow at the door of one’s being while the dark tide rises. Then comes the moon, marvellously serene, and small stars, very merry for some reason of their own. It is so easy to forget, in a worldly life, to attend to these miracles.
So it's the unwinding of your nervous system. The corresponding experience to what winds you up comes out in your dreams. To write a song then, even one like Don't Bother Me, helps to get rid of some subconscious burden. Writing a song is like going to confession.
I had worked in this New York theatre company for my first eight or nine years out of college, acting and directing there, and I'd begun to write a little bit.
When I say I don't have to write pop songs anymore, there's no way I'm going to get on the radio at 60 years of age unless I'm doing a duet with Gaga or I was on 'All of the Lights,' which was a Kanye West record that managed to get on the radio.
Well, I'd had the Fat Mattress earlier as a writing outlet for songs and that.
If you get the landscape right, the characters will step out of it, and they'll be in the right place.
Directing is something I've sort of always felt like I'd like to do at one point and I thought the best way to start it is to write something myself or with someone and I'd go from there.
Even though I loved to write, I never liked English lit. class very much. I think it ruins books when you dissect them too much. I liked my art classes best.
Writing eases my suffering. . . writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence.
By far the most common task for which the machines are used is writing - or word processing, as it's known to the same people who call journalism 'content.
A writer cannot put himself today in service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it.
The words come. Usually, it's a long time before they come. And then when they start to come, it doesn't take so long for it to be finished. It takes a long time to begin. And then it sort of gets finished.
In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.
I remember my emotions the day we watched Nelson Mandela walk out of prison Writing & literature in South Africa during the anti-apartheid years, became a 'cultural weapon. ' You had to use it to fight apartheid & some of us resisted that in the end, you recognize that you are facing a government that has no scruples about using culture & art to oppress you.
Economists must leave to Adam Smith alone the glory of the Quarto, must pluck the day, fling pamphlets into the wind, write always sub specie temporis , and achieve immortality by accident, if at all.
If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.