I love the incredible variety of demands directing makes on you, from the entrepreneur to the hustler to the deal-maker to the writer; to directing actors and the camera and working with music, sound, marketing and promotion. It uses so many sides of...
I find the songs I want to record by listening to as much music as I can. 'When I hear things I really like, I ask the writers to send me a tape of everything they've ever written.
I felt like I had a really bad case of writer's block... Music is so therapeutic for me that if I can't get it out, I start feeling bad about myself - a lot of self-loathing.
I remember Tim telling me that he had an idea for a musical and he said to me that he was hoping that ABBA would be writing the music, which I thought was a pretty wild idea because they were obviously known very much as pop writers.
The problem was the journalists who also did not understand much of my music, but they wrote about it. I think you fell into the usual trap laid out by parts of the press and other writers: that the poor musician has always to fight the evil companie...
I did that for 40 years or more. I never had any writer's block. I got up in the morning, sat down at the typewriter - now, computer - lit up a cigarette.
Pick up any newspaper in the morning. Count the words in the lead sentences. There will be at least 25 in all of them: Guaranteed. The writers just want to tell you how many degrees they have from this college or that university.
Nobody is surprised that women writers accurately represent male characters over and over again, no doubt because everybody knows that women understand men much better than vice-versa.
Most historians and other writers of what we now consider 'primary sources' simply didn't think about women and their contribution to society. They took it for granted, except when that contribution or its lack directly affected men.
Well it kind of is project to project because as a writer I think you always write to some degree about things that you know or things that happened - but my favourite filmmakers, my favourite movies of theirs tend to be the personal movies.
I'd like to produce. I'd like to come up with ideas and collaborate with people and directors and writers that I like, be a part of movies that have the same idea that the movies that impacted me have. I'd like to be able to do that for people.
I don't know if she should worry too much, I mean some of our greatest writers have had movies made of their books, lots of Hemingway novels were turned into movies, it doesn't hurt the book.
Writer: Why piece together the tatters of your life - the vague memories, the faces... the people you never knew how to love?
Barton: W.P. Mayhew? The writer? W.P. Mayhew: Just Bill, please. Barton: [screaming] BILL! You're the finest novelist of our time.
I read somewhere that writers, as they get older, become more and more perfectionist. Which may be because they think more highly of themselves and they worry about their reputations. I think there's some truth to that.
I doubt very much that writers ever go to therapy. I wouldn't! I imagine that I wouldn't have anything to write about after!
People who label erotica writers as sluts/men-whores remind me of the mob that once condemned smart women as witches. Mankind has not evolved much.
PhD, MFA, self-taught—the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.
If I were a writer and not a singer in 10 years, I don't know how I'd feel about writing really personal songs and getting someone else to sing them.
The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living.
For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?
