A writer has an inescapable voice. I think it's inherent in the nature, and I think that we don't control it anymore than we control what we want to write about.
Writing songs has always been hard and easy. It's not always easy when you want it to be, and then sometimes it's just like turning on the faucet. That's just the nature of it.
The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.
The nature of my work is my subjectivity meshed with other people's subjectivity. So there's a correspondence with that... Even if you write about me, it will reflect on you; everything is a kind of weird collaboration.
It is insight into human nature that is the key to the communicator's skill. For whereas the writer is concerned with what he puts into his writings, the communicator is concerned with what the reader gets out of it. He therefore becomes a student of...
I like to write with a lot of emotion and a lot of power. Sometimes I overdo it; sometimes my prose is a little bit too purple, and I know that.
Mark Helprin and Lawrence Durrell, both of whom write fat and florid novels that appall me now but opened my eyes to the power of fiction when I was in my 20s.
I was kind of an outcast in school 'cause I always kept to myself and was writing poetry and then going on tour with my brother band all the time, so kids didn't know what to make of me.
I didn't write anything at all except book reports until I was in seventh grade, and then I wrote mostly poetry for myself.
Poetry for me is very easy. It's like a lightning bolt. I feel this calling, and the first line of the poem comes into my head, and I just have to go to the page, to the typewriter, to the computer or whatever and write it.
When you're writing fiction or poetry... it really comes down to this: indifference to everything except what you're doing... A young writer could do worse than follow the advice given in those lines.
My first book was poetry, but I didn't write it first. I wrote it third. So my first two books were prose.
Why do writers, say, give up a job in economics and decide to write poetry? Or, why do they give up a job in a bank and decide to paint, like Krishan Khanna? They want to convey something.
I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing. I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.
I have a love-hate relationship with Twitter. There are moments I feel like 99 percent of the people who write stuff are the sweetest people, and then one crazy guy or girl spoils the whole thing.
I like to write with people I have a relationship with; otherwise it's kind of scary, and you hold back because you don't want to pour your guts out to someone you never met.
Early on I realized when you write a song about someone, it flatters them on some level, and gives you a lot of room to move within a relationship. A song can kind of get the girl, for sure.
As a songwriter, you respect and appreciate the writings of other people, and I often get asked, are there songs out there I wish I'd written? Yes. There's many of them!
I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can't be like any other author's really.
I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.
I have always loved science, but I have always loved the arts - drawing, painting and, yes, writing - more.
