The important thing is not to be too comfortable when you're writing. Noise in the street? That's good. The computer goes down? That's good. All these things are good. It has to be a little bit of a struggle.
I just sing and write songs and wear what I want. It's quite a good job really. If I wanted to I suppose I could become more of a fashion icon, but singing is my thing.
I'm not everybody's cup of tea. But sometimes criticism can be hurtful. Be respectful. I'm a good piano player, I can sing well, I write good songs. If you don't like it, fair enough. But give me a break.
I am not a good enough writer to have an agenda or come up with a message and try to put it into a song. It's more like you write what comes to you... You try to reflect the mood of the songs.
I've figured out in the course of my life that the one thing I'm good at doing is writing books, and it would be crazy to trade that in for something else.
If the project has good writing and is something I get excited about, then I'll do the role. And if it's for TV, I'll ask myself, 'Is it a show that I'd watch?' If it's a play or movie, I'll want to know if there's a good director attached.
As a means to an end, modelling was good, but I had to distance myself from it when I started working as an actress, because even though I wasn't high-profile, I found in my first write-ups that I'd be referred to as 'model Gemma Chan.'
I know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship.
I'm not good at happy, lightweight kind of music. I'm not really good at pop music. 'Cars' is probably the only true pop song I ever wrote. I wish I could write more, but I'm not very good at it.
I was a different person before I started to write. When I realized I could be a songwriter and that people would listen - that was when I started feeling good in my life.
I can see a version of my life where it all becomes meaningless. On a good day, writing seems noble. Other times, it's narcissistic and pointless.
Life being so short, and the possible books to write so many, it's good to function by night as well as by day; but would anybody become a writer if they realised at the outset what the working hours were?
Writing comes from that territory of being invalidated. But I had a sense of purpose, too. I wanted to stop apologising for my health, and I thought I might do some good.
I don't intend to simply go away and write my plays and be a good boy. I intend to remain an independent and political intelligence in my own right.
The greatest compliment a writer can be given is that a story and character hold a reader spellbound. I'm caught up in the story writing and I miss a good deal of sleep thinking about it and working out the plot points.
I made a good living for a teenager. And I had to learn all different kinds of music - jazz, swing, Motown, pop - and that inspired what kind of music I started to write.
Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.
It's hard to read good fiction when I am writing, because if it is really good I catch myself sort of inadvertently imitating a great writer.
We do very little re-writing in the office. We often take on people who show great promise and who we hope will develop into somebody important and someone good.
I plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space.
You could write a song about some kind of emotional problem you are having, but it would not be a good song, in my eyes, until it went through a period of sensitivity to a moment of clarity. Without that moment of clarity to contribute to the song, i...
