When you're a kid and your father is an engineer, he goes to the office. I saw my father get up and go to the office in the house and write. But I don't see any similarities.
I can't tell you any more than any other writer can tell you why they write, and I don't know what my influences are.
From the beginning, when I first got an idea for a story and wondered if I could write it, it has always been the story that has driven me.
I actually have a young readers' series that I wanna do, kind of in the same lane as a Harry Potter or Narnia or Twilight. I want to write stuff like that.
So, the combination of looking at lots of different people and how they react to each other and how they relate to each other and waiting for that inspiration is the thing that allows me to keep writing.
As a writer, you have to first of all write what you want to. Listen to advice, by all means, but don't get bogged down in it.
Among all kinds of Writing, there is none in which Authors are more apt to miscarry than in Works of Humour, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel.
Although I still write, research and investigate, my role is primarily that of a publisher and editor-in-chief who organises and directs other journalists.
I've written many extra verses to songs that I learned to sing - an extra verse about a friend, or just add some verse - and that led to writing my own songs.
I have been commissioned to write an autobiography and I would be grateful to any of your readers who could tell me what I was doing between 1960 and 1974.
I went through a big Alice Cooper phase, which was probably a major influence on my writing style later, especially after Plastic Surgery Disasters.
If you can write a character who is attractive but morally reprehensible, then you've got a character. It's got to feel like people I know and it doesn't just become a bag of tricks.
I've got no ego; I just like to have thousands of people write to me and tell me how wonderful I am.
When you're writing there's a deep, deep level of concentration way below your normal self. This strange voice, these strange sentences come out of you.
Which one of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?
The purpose of writing is to hold a mirror to nature, but too much today is written from small mirrors in vanity cases.
Writing a screenplay, for me, is like juggling. It's like, how many balls can you get in the air at once? All those ideas have to float out there to a certain point, and then they'll crystallize into a pattern.
When the 'Guardian' is commissioning writers to write obituary pieces about you and your career... it doesn't get much nastier than that. And you've just got to go, 'It doesn't actually matter.'
I only take causes or write about things that I am passionate about, and I do it with a certain flair and a sort of wink and a nod.
When I'm writing a movie, it's usually pretty close to what the movie is going to be, which is just a luxury of being a writer-director.
I pay attention to lyrics and I know what rap fans care about. I try to write for the average listener and I'm conscious of the mainstream without selling out.
