For me, 'risky' is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is.
The whole excitement for writing anything is quite intense. And for a day or two, you think you've done everything extremely well. The problems start on the third day, and continues for the rest of your life.
I always want to write erotic music... Not only about the love between men and women, but in a much more universal sense - about the sensuality of the mechanism of the universe... about life.
I never set out to write literature; I set out to tell stories. And some of my work may be very raunchy and very bloodthirsty - but life, for me, is a violent thing.
I read and write for most of the day, but I do let myself be interrupted by real life. I enjoy going out with friends and try not to take myself too seriously.
When I was 21, I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for 'The Simpsons' who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.
When I'm sitting at the desk not being able to write line one, it's silence and despair! It's not so easy to put the pen to the legal pad or type the first sentence on the computer screen.
I write on big yellow legal pads - ideas in outline form when I'm doing stand-up and stuff. It's vivid that way. I can't type it into an iPad - I think that would put a filter into the process.
People read legal writing differently. When you're at the crux of a legal argument, every step is a step in the argument. The judge will see any holes. If you do that in fiction, it's too long and boring.
I have terrible handwriting. I now say it's a learning disability... but a nun who was a very troubled woman hit me over the fingers with a ruler because my writing was so bad.
When I was first learning songs, I'd have a favorite song, and I'd take the chords and twist them around. I'd learn the chords and then play them backward. That was my first experimenting with writing a song.
I think you need to understand games to write them. There's a learning curve, just like there's a learning curve in anything. It's not precisely the same as film or television, but you're using the same muscles.
I decided to become a surgeon named Bernie who writes books and gives seminars to teach people what he has learned and is still learning about how to deal with life's difficulties.
I think young people are the most creative and the coolest - people that we should be learning from. Even when I'm at a party, I'm analyzing it and thinking about it in the context of how I would write about it. That side of me never switches off.
Part of the joy of music is listening to lots of different kinds of music and learning from it. Specifically for me, I like writing songs that move me, and what moves me are beautiful songs on the piano or the guitar and really, really heavy music.
I've been writing music since 4th grade, and I love putting words together and expressing things in a way that you can move your head to and you can really relate to, because I have a lot to say.
I try to write the books I would love to come upon that are honest, concerned with real lives, human hearts, spiritual transformation, families, secrets, wonder, craziness - and that can make me laugh.
Whenever I realize I'm being a goofball, I write it down. When I release the joke onstage, I love watching the effect it has on the audience. No one wants to see someone talk who takes themselves too seriously.
I'm a big fan of Yoko, one of those weird people who really love her music, and who argues with people all the time, because people do write her off.
'If I Should Love Again' - I was just so impressed with myself writing something like that. It wasn't a single and people didn't really know about it, but it's a beautiful song and that's part of what I'm loving.
I write about emotions - falling in and out of love, finding what you want to do, no matter where you are or who you are. I think that's why people feel connected.
