The reason I write romance is that I like happy endings. The idea, you know, 'It's not literature unless is ends badly,' and I really don't like that. There's enough misery and bad things happening in the world.
Authors always carry a means for scribbling and an excuse for pausing, often inopportunely, to record those fleeting sparks of creative fancy that might otherwise vanish like a wisp in the wind if ignored. Writing is a jealous and needy lover.
It's a phenomenal experience jumping from the devious mind of a sorceress bent on conquering the world to the compassionate musing of a queen capable of healing life with a touch—all in a flicker of thought. That's why I love writing.
I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture - I'd write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be.
At school, I was always daydreaming and fiddling in inkwells, but I had to learn to grow up and become articulate. And doing that was what brought me into writing songs. It's like therapy for me, because it exposes what I'm really thinking.
Everyone is so estranged; no one is rooted. That's what I like to write about more than anything else. Everything being so mixed up. Racially mixed up, people moving from place to place, everything shifting.
You look at any industry - you're not innovating unless people are questioning it. If you're innovating, you're doing something nobody's done before, which means you're re-writing rules, resetting boundaries, re-creating systems. And that means the t...
When you're an artist, you can only do your own stuff. Even if you only write for other people, you're really more focused on yourself. So while everybody's out touring, I'm working on records.
Were I a philosopher, I should write a philosophy of toys, showing that nothing else in life need to be taken seriously, and that Christmas Day in the company of children is one of the few occasions on which men become entirely alive.
I wouldn't know how to write a weak female character. I read so much epic fantasy growing up, where you have these sword-wielding, in-your-face warrior maidens.
I've found contemporary Britain difficult to write about because it seems to me to have lacked gravity or grandeur. This is some cultural problem which I don't really understand. It simply isn't the same in the United States.
I just don't think I've had the desire yet to write a vicious animal - like a dog-gone-bad or anything - where I do feel that I need a balance of all types of humans.
I think there's plenty of room for blogs that exist to pay the blogger, or blogs that exist to turn a profit. That's just not the kind of blog I'm writing, and I'm not the kind of blogger that could do that.
Habits like blogging often and regularly, writing down the way you think, being clear about what you think are effective tactics, ignoring the burbling crowd and not eating bacon. All of these are useful habits.
I write letters to my right brain all the time. They're just little notes. And right brain, who likes to get little notes from me, will often come through within a day or two.
I started writing lyrics out of desperation. I was broke and wondering where my next job, my next meal was coming from, although I had had several successful revue songs on Broadway.
I never write about CIA conspiracies or the FBI or mafia or anything like that because I just don't understand that world. But I think I do understand individual human harmfulness.
I am trying to write novels for properly clever people, but I also want them to be proper novels that also stick in a person's mind and have an atmosphere about them.
When I set out to write crime fiction, I didn't think to myself, 'I'm going to model myself on Agatha Christie' or 'I am going to be a crime writer in the Christie tradition'.
I think if you write about human relationships, you're always exploring the psyche and the soul. I don't separate certain - perhaps more extreme - things that people do from others.
Writing is about allowing yourself to become a vessel of creativity. Writers are avatars of creation. We have tender hearts, and strong emotions. It's hard not to when you have a million different people's personalities playing out in your head.
