That same night, I wrote my first short story. It took me thirty minutes. It was a dark little tale about a man who found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he found ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls piled up, so did his greed grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife's slain body in his arms.
I wrote comedy sketches in college.
Nothing,' wrote Tolstoy, 'can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.
I have a graduate degree from Penn State. I studied at Penn State under a noted Hemingway scholar, Philip Young. I had an interest in thrillers, and it occurred to me that Hemingway wrote many action scenes: the war scenes in 'A Farewell to Arms' and 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' come to mind. But the scenes don't feel pulpy.
I just always wrote songs as a side hobby. So it was sort of a natural thing to write comedy songs. But when I started writing songs, I wrote very serious songs. Or things that a 13-14 year-old would think are very serious issues.
I look at albums like novels. If you write a really good scene or a really good moment, just because you wrote it, doesn't mean that it fits with the story that you're writing.
When I wrote my eighth thriller, Inside Out, in 2009, the villains were a group of CIA and other government officials who colluded to destroy a series of tapes depicting Americans torturing war-on-terror prisoners.
People are fascinated by the rich: Shakespeare wrote plays about kings, not beggars.
If you like what you're reading, I probably wrote it.
Jim Henson was the only piece of fan mail I ever wrote when I was a little kid.
I was thinking a lot about the aftermath of bad choices, how people deal with the trauma of having survived trauma, if that makes sense, and so I wrote about this character's last day on the job, how after spending 15 years pretending to be a rabbi, he'd in effect become a rabbi.
I wrote it the right way, so it was copied the wrong way right. I mean the right way wrong.
I remember doing "As Cool As I Am" and Steve [Miller], the producer, saying "I really hear a drum loop here. I want to play it for you. " When I wrote it, I thought, "This isn't going to sound very folky. I don't think it's going to go with mandolins and banjos. " Then he played the loop for me and it sounded right.
My writing is very organic. It's what I am. My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig. So I think of it as something that's very essential to my being.
As my editor had no desire to frighten readers with the Romanian pages, he had them translated and published the whole thing in French in 1984. It was only years later, in Romania, that I was able to publish the book as I wrote it.
I always knew I wanted to be a musician, and I always knew I wanted to write, 'cause the people I was listening to all wrote. I never thought it was an option to sing anyone else's songs.
I think I settled on the title before I ever wrote the book.
I wrote each book in thirty-five days flat - just to get the darned thing finished.
With 'Brick,' I wrote the script when I was 23 and didn't make the movie until I was 30.
The secret to writing is just to write. Write every day. Never stop writing. Write on every surface you see; write on people on the street. When the cops come to arrest you, write on the cops. Write on the police car. Write on the judge. I'm in jail forever now, and the prison cell walls are completely covered with my writing, and I keep writing on the writing I wrote. That's my method.