I've found is that by doing stand-up, I've actually learned how to combat depression. I don't have clinical, but I've definitely had my bouts with it. I just figured out that it's a choice. You're in control of your brain. When your brain is sending you bad information or bad thoughts, you can decide to go to the gym, or write a new joke - or if you're on the road, go to a ball game. . . something that's going to get the blood going. Or you can let those thoughts take you right down the rabbit hole.
I talk to myself on paper about my characters - sometimes writing in first person. . . I keep lists of unanswered questions that I can always turn to in order to get myself going.
I used to think when I had children that somebody else had the rule book and they hadn't given it to me, and everybody else knew how to do it right except me. I find the same thing in writing: you think that everybody knows what they're doing and that you don't.
My writing process isn't a very organized thing. The actual writing part is a tiny part of my life. I often write in public. I bring my laptop or write freehand in notebooks. Then, I'll read through them while I exercise or walk the dog. The very last thing I do is the sitting alone at the computer part.
When I write something that would have made me laugh as a 10-year-old, or would have scared me or would have excited me, I know I'm onto something.
In a sense, all actors are character actors, because we're all playing different characters. But a lot of the time - and I don't know, because I'm not a writer - but writers a lot of times write second- and third-tier characters better than they write primary characters. I guess they're more fun.
Songwriting is like. . . being possessed. You try to go to sleep but the song won't let you.
I learned that you can't write a book in the margins of your life. I'd forgotten how much uninterrupted time it takes to write chapters, and how you have to push everything else aside and really focus.
Do you know anything about fashion magazines? Being treated like superficial bimbos by men like you, and having to write about designer brands. Do you know what that feels like?
Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.
It's assumed that if you're a woman, you want to be the prettiest version of yourself. It always put me in a bad mood. It was like, "OK, I'm successful. I'm supposed to be happy. Well, why aren't I happy?" Part of the problem was that my looked-at-ness had become a priority over my art making. Over and over again it was like, "I don't have time for this. I want to work. " I love writing. I don't love somebody putting false eyelashes on me.
Here's some free advice; like the folkies of yore, you need to be not just a writer of songs, you need to be a lover of songs, a listener of songs and a collector of songs. If you hear a song in a club that knocks you out or you hear an old recording of a great song you never knew existed, it does not diminish you to record it; it actually exalts you because you have brought a great song from obscurity to the ear of the public.
My father, a bookkeeper who never earned more than $11,000 a year in his life, sat there, writing out a $25 check to the NAACP. When I asked him why, he said discrimination against anyone is discrimination against us all. And I never forgot that. Indeed, his philanthropy was a gift, not just to that organization, but to me.
I wanted to write songs which I think is a different thing. I wanted to write music that is informed by folk music. The chord progressions are obvious references.
Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read.
When you are out of favor, so to speak, it's not just the reviewers. It's the editors, the publishers, they don't want you anymore, you're just gone and you've been written out of history as effectively as the old Stalinists would write someone else out, take their photograph out of a book.
If prolific is writing a lot of songs, I'm that. If it's writing a lot of good songs, I'm something else.
The best friend a man can have is reading and writing, and the bad ones to avoid are Go and chess and flute and pipe.
I write music, and I want people to listen to it and care about it and have it make some difference in their lives. When I'm fortunate for that to happen, then of course I feel very, very good about it.
I don't think humanity just replays history, but we are the same people our ancestors were, and our descendants are going to face a lot of the same situations we do. It's instructive to imagine how they would react, with different technologies on different worlds. That's why I write science fiction -- even though the term 'science fiction' excites disdain in certain persons.