If you are a married man resident in Cuba, you cannot get a passport to go to the next town without your wife's permission in writing.
If you're actually allowing your creative part to control your writing rather than a more commercial instinct or motive, then you'll find that all sorts of interesting things will bubble up to the surface.
I had reached a point in my career in which I was ready to try something new in my writing, and the idea of a novel has always been in the back of my mind.
There were songs I would write about breaking up with somebody before I broke up with them, months and months before I broke up with them.
I know that if a film is ready to emerge out of what I write, I'll be able to go off and make it without asking anyone's permission.
I like writing better. Because I don't have to wear makeup, I don't have to be thin, and I don't have to remember lines.
My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.
Reading and writing is so important, and it's something I am really keen to promote. It's something that can be a bit lost these days with so much else going on.
It's true that I'm taking a break from writing a regular column to do other things but it's got nothing to do with what dear Simon has or has not written.
Why do I write? From selfishness. Because this state of liquefied, complex concentration, however faintly and dimly I'm able to perceive it, is the greatest pleasure I know.
I dreamt of being a writer once I started to read. I started to write 'Bonjour Tristesse' in bistros around the Sorbonne. I finished it, I sent it to editors. It was accepted.
For about twenty years, if I managed to write ten or twelve poems in a year; I considered that a pretty successful year, but I wrote 'The Beforelife' within a year.
Look at what's happening in this world. Every day there's something exciting or disturbing to write about. With all that's going on, how could I stop?
A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.
Young people will tell you, if you're not prepared to write the most violent, the most misogynistic, the most horrible kinds of rhymes and scenarios, you are not going to get air play.
Well, you know, I don't think anyone who writes a television series has a master plan from the beginning, and knows all the character traits, and everything that's going to happen.
Customary though it may be to write about that institutionalized pastime as though it existed apart from the general environment, my story does not lend itself to such treatment.
I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.
If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code.
I guess I went into journalism to save the world. I always felt through writing that I wanted to rotate the world slightly.
When we first started playing we did a lot of rehearsing. We used to write out everything. In fact, that's the way everybody rehearses: we play the tunes and improvise.
