I really didn't write it with any intention of being published. If I'd known that was going to happen, I would have written something more sensible, because now I have to dress up as a pirate for book signings... I would have done a novel about a man...
When they offered me 'Wayne's World 2,' they said: 'We were going to give this to another actor, then we thought we'd see you'. I just thought: 'Surely you always had me in mind for that just in the way that it's written?', but they never admitted it...
Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language--not that ...
Capitol Records were very keen for me to write and see how I got on; I think that is what defined my sound. The first session I had was with two young up-and-coming writers, Nick Atkinson and Tom Wilding, and I went into a session a bit nervous becau...
I keep a lot of my old baseball hats, and if you look in the hats I've had since I started pitching, you'll see 'Philippians 4:13' written on the brim. That's the Scripture that gets me through the day because sometimes you can't do it all by yoursel...
The difference between wanting to write and having written is one year of hard, relentless labour. It's a bridge you have to build all by yourself, all alone, all through the night, while the world goes about its business without giving a damn. The o...
Everything I write doesn't appear to be biography until later. I often say that I've never written about anything I've experienced. Of course, that's not true. But it doesn't appear familiar to me at all. And maybe that's because I have to be in a ki...
I think, in a written novel, the way in which you play with the readers' emotion or the way in which you engage the readers' emotions can be very indirect. You could come at it through irony or comedy, etcetera, and you could capture people's sympath...
On Twitter, people who had read my book followed me and I could see what else they were reading, why they'd liked what I'd written and by the by, more about them than I'd ever elicit from two minutes in a tent at a book festival, stuck behind a signi...
The history written, taught, and sworn to as ‘the unvarnished truth’ by the establishment—any establishment, left or right, conservative or liberal, capitalist or socialist or fascist—is generally revisionist, narrow in perspective, monolithi...
'Killer Joe' was originally written in 1991 and first produced in '93 at the Next Theater's Lab - a 40 seat black box theater in Evanston, Illinois - back when I was getting started. I was just 25 and I had been acting for awhile, but it was my first...
I started writing because it was hard to find acting jobs. I didn't like any monologues in auditions, so I started to write my own things. Since then, I have written a couple of shows. I was nominated for playwright of the year for a play I wrote cal...
If AOL had ever ordered me to remove a piece of content from the site for any reason, I would have immediately written about it and disclosed the situation to our readers. And if I had ever ordered a writer to remove content, I would have expected th...
As a man may know about Africa either by going there personally or by reading descriptions written by travelers who have been there, so may he visit the super-physical realms if he will but qualify himself therefor, or he may learn what others who ha...
A Plan B life can be just as good or better than a Plan A life. You just have to let go of that first dream and realize that God has already written the first chapter of the new life that awaits you. All you have to do is start reading!
The program of A.A., as written by Bill Wilson and Dr. Smith, only has one purpose: to get you sober. That's it. To make you a better person, forget it. That was one of the things he came to understand in those years of trial and error. It has to be ...
It’s a saying from thousands of years ago, written in a language called Latin about a place called Rome,” he explains. “Panem et Circenses translates into ‘Bread and Circuses.’ The writer was saying that in return for full bellies and enter...
She drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written...
There aren't many great passages written about food, but I love one by George Millar, who worked for the SOE in the second world war and wrote a book called 'Horned Pigeon.' He had been on the run and hadn't eaten for a week, and his description of t...
It really gets on my goat that people keep quoting Dorothea Mackellar's 'My Country' as proof that there is no such thing as climate change. A poem written more than 100 years ago by a homesick 19 year old versus an ever-increasing body of refereed s...
I flew into a small airport surrounded by cornfields and pastures, ready to carry out the two commands my father had written out for me the night before I left Calcutta: Spend two years studying creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, then co...
