The people who write official histories for the Army believe that a generation needs to pass before you can tackle the official history. It's useful to have some distance. Sources become available. Passions cool. It allows an opportunity to make some...
The most common criticism I've seen is that I write 'popcorn fantasy:' lightweight action-adventure. Some people call it that as they explain why they love it for exactly that reason. I'm cool with that, either way. I just nod and let it go.
I want a hit. I don't think anybody spends 12 months writing and recording an album, making something cool, and says, 'Great, I hope this doesn't sell.' I don't understand that mind-set. I want hits: a big bunch of them.
I don't think that TV on the Radio is some dark mysterious band that no one can know about. We write music because it's an immediate form of communication. We're able to put on record what's happening in our times, and we want that message to be hear...
I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.
When you're lucky enough to get paid a nice chunk of change to write a movie or a TV show, you have no right to complain, really. I guess it's more of an appeal to the powers that be that the less they interfere, the more likely, actually, they are t...
The only pressure I feel is to write good books. And to not replicate the previous book. Whether you have a thousand readers or a million readers it doesn't change the pressure. I never feel tempted to give the reader what I think the reader wants.
I think it's time to have a celebration of life and renew our vows. And this time we're going to write the vows because they're going to mean a lot more. We certainly put the 'in sickness and in health' vow to the test the last year and half.
What I see as the particularly exciting prospect for writing horror fiction as we go forward is setting stories in more internal landscapes than external ones, mapping out the mind as the home for scary things instead of the house at the end of the l...
When I was a young mother at home with a two year old and a five year old, living on the Eastside in one of those neighborhoods where all the houses look the same, where all the cars look the same and the lawns look the same, I was writing in secret.
The United States has made a massive effort since the end of the Second World War to secure the dominance of its films in foreign markets - an achievement generally pushed home politically, by writing clauses into various treaties and aid packages.
We had offers to go everywhere and we could have done them. But what would have been the point? We were tired. We had worked hard and needed a break before we got stale. We spent six months at home and writing songs.
It sounds pretentious to say I 'divide' my time, but when I am home, that usually means my house in Atlanta or my cabin in the North Georgia Mountains. The latter is where I do the majority of my writing.
I think the advent of the Internet gave us all a big boost, because by the time the Internet became mainstream and you could get it in your home, a lot of us were used to dealing in fan culture, writing to magazines or anything at the back of comic b...
I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps mor...
Working on 'Raising Hope' is a very hurry-up-and-wait activity, and I just always liked the idea of being as productive as I can be. I write because I don't just want that time to dissolve, where I'm sitting in a trailer staring blankly at the painti...
I think the few writers who influenced me most in writing short stories are Alice Munro and Grace Paley. They're very different, and I can't do what they do, but reading them gives me hope that I'll learn something from them.
I started out writing poems before I figured to put melodies to them and play the guitar. Somewhere, there's a book out there on all those early songs and poems. I hope no one ever finds it. I don't think it's my finest work.
Smart people often talk trash about happiness and worse than trash about books on happiness, and they have been doing so for centuries - just as long as other people have been pursuing happiness and writing books about it.
I didn't intend 'Hector' to be a self-help book when I first started writing. I wrote it as a little tale about a psychiatrist, like me, who sets off around the world in order to discover the vital ingredients for happiness.
My books are love stories at core, really. But I am interested in manifestations of love beyond the traditional romantic notion. In fact, I seem not particularly inclined to write romantic love as a narrative motive or as an easy source of happiness ...
