I have spent over 60 years bent over a guitar and to know that I wrote 70 compositions that masters have recorded, that makes me feel so good and full, and proud and thankful to the good Lord.
Ringo: 'I do get emotional when I think back about those times. My make-up is emotional. I'm an emotional human being. I'm very sensitive and it took me till I was forty-eight to realize that was the problem! We were honest with each other and we were honest about the music. The music was positive. It was positive in love. They did write - we all wrote - about other things, but the basic Beatles message was Love.
Our whole intention was to make a record of songs that we grew up with and change them up a little bit, but we kind of stumbled on writing "Joseph's Lullaby. " The irony is when I originally wrote the song, it was called "Mary's Lullaby. " I wrote it from Mary's standpoint and it was in a higher key, a real falsetto, and it just wasn't right. One day, the producer's wife said, "Well, it's kind of odd that you're singing from Mary's perspective, being the guy. Why don't you do Joseph?
In 1976 I wrote a lot about women trying to claim the right to work.
Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he's a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he's a novel.
No one sells a song better than the person that wrote it.
I often wonder if you wrote your memoir today, if your life story would be lived on the edge of possibility, if you held wonder in one hand and courage in the other and truly believed that anything was possible.
When I was young I was working with a lot of people being out in the south. My uncle wrote for Al Green and I was around Al a lot.
I wrote an essay too, and mine started something like, "When I was asked to contribute to this book, I said, 'I could do a piece on [Larry] Kramer as a pain in the ass, but I suppose you have too many of those, as it is. '" And Sarah's began something like, "When I read about America's angriest AIDS activist, I can't believe they are talking about my sweet Uncle Larry. "
One critic wrote. . . that my poems sounded as though they had been translated from the Hungarian. I don't know why, but somehow that made me feel quite lighthearted.
I don't think I would do better books if I wrote full time. I write for amateurish reasons.
I embrace technology and I just think that in 1984 when James Cameron wrote about the technology, everyone thought he was totally way out there and it was science fiction. Now it's almost reality what he talked about. The machines have taken over, except they have not become self-aware, like in Terminator. So this is really one thing that we have to watch out for, but I think technology is good.
Let's escape the past. The past didn't work. All we have is the future, and I'm the one who wrote "no future for you!" Don't let the irony be lost.
There is something so hopeful about a diary, a journal, a new notebook, which Joan Didion and Virginia Woolf both wrote about. A blog. Perhaps we all are waiting for someone to discover us.
I always tried, in the books I wrote, to make it clear: Thin is not the goal. But I was thin. So no matter what I said, the subliminal message was, "You have to look a certain way. " And I'm not happy about playing into that.
Whatever I wrote was heretical. It offended the editors of the women's magazines.
As soon as I finished the first book, I wrote a second, which I hope to sell this year, and I have just about finished the third book in the series. Two more are already outlined. I'm in this for the long haul.
When you wrote it didn't matter if hysteria sometimes came up in your face and voice (unless, of course, you let it find its way into your "literary voice") because writing was done in merciful privacy and silence. Even if you were partly out of your mind it might turn out to be all right: you could try for control even harder than Blanche Dubois was said to have tried, and with luck you could still bring off a sense of order and sanity on the page for the reader. Reading, after all, was a thing done in privacy and silence too.
English is taking over the world. I just wrote a piece about it. And it's not by design. The United States dominates because it's the biggest market.
Stop and think of what happened in America. The melting pot, yeah, it happened. Stop and think of what happened, from the first days of the founding. You have to go back to the Pilgrims. You have to include the Pilgrims in the founding. Why they came. What they learned on the way. What they learned after they got here. The Pilgrims, like everybody else, tried to establish a socialist collective. Bombed out. Didn't work. We know this, the governor wrote about it himself, William Bradford.