I’ve always found that the better the book I’m reading, the smarter I feel, or, at least, the more able I am to imagine that I might, someday, become smarter.
It's possible I'm a weird person, you know, and if I could only write for people who are like me, I wouldn't have any audience at all. Ultimately, I'm my audience. I'm writing stories for myself. I don't have kids of my own, and I don't hang around k...
I read obsessively when I'm writing. I think there are two kinds of fiction writers, those who read incessantly while they write and those who can't read at all, lest their individual voices get overwhelmed, or tainted somehow. I'm the first kind. To...
I have a very beautiful room that in my house that we bought in Princeton. It's glass on three sides, and you'd think that's the perfect place to write. Somehow in that nice room I feel too exposed, and I can notice I'm too distracted by things going...
I hadn't played any music since freshman year of college, more than thirty years ago, so I had to relearn everything. I started writing songs. Some were dance and trance songs (I listen to them a lot while I'm writing), and some were love songs, beca...
I often get asked the question, 'If you had to compare your writing to an author who would it be?' My answer is always the same; the author I compare myself to is me. Every writer has a unique style relevant to only themselves. I am nothing like othe...
If we can't forget, how can we forgive? I believe that forgiving can't be done by willpower alone. I can will myself to write out my own memories and feelings. I can will myself to imagine onto the page how someone else may have felt. I can will myse...
I can't write songs unless I am in love.
I love acting but I also love writing, especially comedy.
I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided.
At night I can write for hours.
Writing is something I can do by myself.
I cannot write music. I cannot play the piano.
I started writing songs when I was eight.
Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft. If you want to write, practice writing.
Literature represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control.
Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.
When you're hounded by the shame of the past, you can turn into a pretty miserable person who is always trying to measure up and please others.
As a writer you must keep a tight rein on your subjective self—the traveler touched by new sights and sounds and smells—and keep an objective eye on the reader.
I've lost track of the number of people who want to be writers but never actually write anything. Talking about writing, dreaming about writing, can be very fun, but it won't get a book written. You've got to write.
Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.
