I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can't teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.
With anything I do, it's hard to categorize it. With any project, I just go in and blindly start writing songs and then find out which way we want to go with it.
Every musician writes about past relationships. And other than that, I can promise you, I have very little in common with Taylor Swift.
I think I subconsciously put myself in these situations where the girlfriend isn't pleased with me. I'm useless as a boyfriend. That's how I managed to write all these songs.
All I ever really wanted to do was arouse souls through my writing and enjoy my journey to becoming one with myself and with the world.
With each book, in each place, I have to keep an ongoing map as I write because otherwise I don't know where I am.
I have to write because if I don't get something down then after a while I feel it's going to bang the side of my head off.
If I don't have a project going, I sit down and begin to write something - a character sketch, a monologue, a description of some sight, or even just a list of ideas.
It's important, I think, for a writer of fiction to maintain an awareness of the pace and shape of the book as he's writing it. That is, he should be making an object, not chattering.
Nothing beats novel writing because it's complete expression of you. You just control everything. Not even a movie director has that level of control.
[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!
I don't know what the inspiration for most of songs really mean until I finish them. For the most part, I'm going for a visceral impression, and I write the words last.
Obituaries were among my favorite to write because they have elements no other news stories have - a story from start to finish with a proper conclusion.
The first set of lyrics for the first songs I ever wrote, which are the ones on 'Pretty Hate Machine,' came from private journal entries that I realized I was writing in lyric form.
I have an obsession with knowing the answers to things. When I don't know what happened, it just bothers me, gets under my skin, and I need to write about it.
The thing that happens remarkably often is that the people who are writing a dissertation believe they need to speak to me in order to do their dissertation. They need to interview me.
In the end, one has to feel lucky that things fell out O.K. I've felt that all the years I've been writing plays.
I am not somebody who meets a man or a woman somewhere and feels like that is an incredible character that I must write into a play.
Each night before I go to bed, I take out a small card and write a list of the things I need to do the next day in order of their priority.
I'm writing a novel about two actresses who go to New York, because that's what I know about. One has lost touch with reality, disappears and is picked up by a man.
So, why do you write these strong female characters? Because you’re still asking me that question." [ speech, May 15, 2006]
