I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all.
I could start with Mandelstam, who was a huge influence on my early writing.
However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.
As soon as I started writing, other writers stopped wanting me acting in their shows - maybe they thought I was going to rewrite them.
Painting is marvelous; it makes you happier and more patient. Afterwards you do not have black fingers as with writing, but blue and red ones.
The imagination of creative thought can be a crazy place,this giving reason to write it down to try and make sense of it all.
I guess writing is a kind of therapy in the sense that there are things you need to say and you say them, and better out than in.
Writing poetry is about learning to pare down the poem to the most essential words. Every word used has to be crucial to the poem.
The fact that I have been successful merely means that I can write and illustrate in my own way.
What I said about John was that he liberated me from my anxieties about writing in a correct, acceptable way.
When I start to write, I don't have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.
I envy those writers who outline their novels, who know where they're going. But I find writing is a process of discovery.
Anarchists prepare for social revolution and use every means- speech, writing, or deed, whichever is more to the point - to accelerate revolutionary development.
I need some kind of emotional stake in it to write my lyrics, assuming that place. It might just be an emotion I understand but am not currently experiencing necessarily.
I actually have, in all seriousness, in the back of my mind someday to write a book, the title of which would be 'Quit Now and Other Practical Advice for the Aspiring Actor.'
They say that every writer, they write about himself, and I think that to a certain extent that is true. But also we are creators of fiction.
There's always a personal satisfaction in writing a song by yourself. You get the inspiration, and see it through, and you're done. It's focused and very personal.
There may well be writers who roll up their sleeves and say, 'I'm going to write a post-9/11 novel' but I wasn't one of those.
Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.
Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.
I write the poems first, with only a few exceptions for odd reasons, where I'm given the illustration first.
