I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track.
When it comes to the recording and writing, it's still mostly Mickey and I. But now there's this whole live entity that's a whole different thing, and it seems to be where we're gaining the most popularity.
Academics have given up trying to recover an honest picture of the past and have decided that their history-writing should be simply an instrument of moral hand-wringing.
Before I liked to write, I liked to type. I remember visiting my grandmother Adele in Ponce Inlet, Florida, when I was three years old, and she had an IBM electric typewriter.
When I was around eight, I learned how to touch-type at school, and I received a computer as a present. I started writing plays, and for many years I thought I would be a playwright.
When I write, I am not giving a lecture, I am speculating on behavior. Sometimes this is dangerous, but it should be. As I say often, theatre is a dark place and we should keep the light out of it.
The difference between the casual impression and the intensified image is about as great as that separating the average business letter from a poem. If you choose your subject selectively—intuitively—the camera can write poetry.
Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices." [ ( , 20 February 2010)]
Everyone thinks when they start writing that they can't do it. I was lucky. My sister Delia was the most important person in terms of encouraging me.
I was a very imaginative child, and my parents were very encouraging of that. My sister and I would put on plays; I would write my own stories.
What’s the use of writing poetry for your peers? I don’t think I should sell my poetry to other poets. If that’s who my audience is, I’m dead, I’m not going to make any money.
I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide." [ , September 1961]
Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself...It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.
Sometimes I do feel like I write the same story again and again. And for me, I am always looking for a place with a kind of redemption.
I always tell my students, 'If you walk around with your eyes and ears open, you can't possibly live long enough to write all the novels you'll encounter.'
This election isn't about Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. It's about you. The other guys write $10 million checks and make $10,000 bets. But we've bet this campaign on you.
I'd like to make character-based dramas. I end up writing thrillers a lot - these psychological character-based things with weird people doing horrible things to each other - coming to a theatre near you!
With poetry and writing, the question isn’t “do you know the right words?”. The real question is, “can you make words from the unwordable, chisel blocks of raw silence into shapes and touch our souls?
I felt like I could write about quiet, self-contained moments and also about those moments when the world rushes in again.
Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation; it doesn't require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose fiction, but rather a calm, rational, even conversational voice.
A really well-done first draft of a book bares your soul. The purpose of revision is so that everyone who reads the published version believes you were writing about theirs.
