I'm of the Samuel Goldwyn school of writing: If you need to send a message, call Western Union. Any messages people take away from my books are the ones they see in them.
As far as I'm concerned, I'm a writer who's writing books, and therefore, I don't want to die. You'd miss the end of the book wouldn't you? You can't die with an unfinished book.
You have to have really wide reading habits and pay attention to the news and just everything that's going on in the world: you need to. If you get this right, then the writing is a piece of cake.
If I behave like a good boy and take my Prozac...then I won't be able to write anymore. I'll have Writer's block from not being able to communicate with the characters in my mind.
I'm the kind of person who needs to feel like everything happens for a reason. When you date a guy and it goes badly, that's horrible. But if you can write a song about it, then it was worth it.
Even when the writing seems very frivolous, I'm puritanical. I don't mean my subject matter. It's that I'm almost pathologically incapable of leaving something when I'm not quite happy with it.
I've done for the most part pretty much what I intended - I ended up doing comedy, writing and painting. I've had a ball. And as I get older, I just become an older kid.
No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.
I used to write chronologically when I started, from beginning to end. Eventually I went, 'That's absurd; my heart is in this one scene, therefore I must follow it.'
There are horrible events going on all over the world. Human beings are really fucking up. Poets, we can’t just write poems. We have to put poems into action.
When you write songs, you can't really point out the exact thing you're inspired by. It's more a state or a mood or an atmosphere that you're trying to put into words.
Sometimes you're trapped in writing songs and you don't have enough distance from what you do anymore and you need the talent and the years of other people to come and jump in.
When I started to write realistic, real fiction, the voices that were the strongest for me - the characters that I heard, the people that I knew - were the ones from my childhood.
Yeah, I write Urban Fantasy, but its more like Die Hard or Indiana Jones with Fairies, Mummies and a Vampire who uses guns more than his teeth.
I started teaching myself guitar because I loved singing so much. Then one day kind of out of the blue I found I was writing a song. It just happened organically.
If I ever saw my muse she would be an old woman with a tight bun and spectacles poking me in the middle of the back and growling, "Wake up and write the book!
Writing is the hardest thing I know, but it was the only thing I wanted to do. I wrote for 20 years and published nothing before my first book.
I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.
It's a whole new world out here. The online world is like a blackboard on which, when you write, the whole world can see - and I'm thrilled about this development. I want to make full use of it.
Once I start writing about something, it goes off rather fast, and sometimes details which might be interesting such as what the room looked like or what somebody said that was not exactly on the same subject tend to get lost.
The rumors of Frank Sinatra's violence and his ties to organized crime were such that journalists joked in print about me ending up in concrete boots and sleeping with the fishes if I proceeded to write his biography.
