I don't intend to simply go away and write my plays and be a good boy. I intend to remain an independent and political intelligence in my own right.
The greatest compliment a writer can be given is that a story and character hold a reader spellbound. I'm caught up in the story writing and I miss a good deal of sleep thinking about it and working out the plot points.
I made a good living for a teenager. And I had to learn all different kinds of music - jazz, swing, Motown, pop - and that inspired what kind of music I started to write.
Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.
It's hard to read good fiction when I am writing, because if it is really good I catch myself sort of inadvertently imitating a great writer.
We do very little re-writing in the office. We often take on people who show great promise and who we hope will develop into somebody important and someone good.
I plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space.
You could write a song about some kind of emotional problem you are having, but it would not be a good song, in my eyes, until it went through a period of sensitivity to a moment of clarity. Without that moment of clarity to contribute to the song, i...
There are people who say they want to write novels. They think, 'I'll learn my craft on the romance novel.' If you don't love the genre, it's going to show, and it's not going to be a good book.
The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.
Being in a rock band is about touring. It's about writing songs and it's about making records but it's also about taking a wonderful smile onto that stage and making the people feel good about themselves.
Other writers definitely influence my writing. What encourages me and inspires me is when I read a good book. It makes me want to be a better writer.
Good writers know that crime is an entre into telling a greater story about character. Good crime writing holds up a mirror to the readers and reflects in a darker light the world in which they live.
We all are who we are. We're not necessarily good, and we're not necessarily bad. So much television, in the writing, is so one-dimensional, in that aspect, where you have your good guys and you have your bad guys.
I am very aware that playwrights, particularly good ones, have a intention for everything they write. Language and punctuation is used specifically, and most of the time actors can find wonderful clues about character in the rhythm and cadence of the...
I don't know if Jim was a major part of that or not. He is one of a small group of real storytellers. He has enormous imagination and ability to write. I'm glad he's coming back. It's going to be good for the show.
Write what you love. Love will hold you through the hard times and hold the world during the good times.
Still, on 'Friends', we had some guest-stars who were less than spectacular, not the stunt-casting, but just regular guest-stars, and they weren't particularly great actors, but the material was so good that they scored. It's the writing.
There's always a question of duration, there's a question of who the orchestra is. No one is free to write what you want - you collaborate on a film score, and one of the good things is that someone else's work is motivating you.
A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don't mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it's a big book, there has to be more than one undertow.
So I'm writing more highly personalized and intellectual music, and I think that's good. It might take longer to find me, but I think that niche is perhaps underserved, so I'm going to serve that.
