'Among Friends' was really well written and had strong characters, and while all the elements were there to make it a great genre film, it also left room for me to put a creative flair on it that wasn't your typical slasher or psychological thriller.
If you had told me in the Seventies and Eighties that TV would be as edgy or edgier than most films, and more intelligently written than most films, I wouldn't have believed it. There's great stuff out there.
As any student of literature knows, the books that last are often not the books that are most popular when they are written. Both 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' were complete failures, critically and commercially, when they first appeared.
For me, the essence of the great American Dream is spiritual. I believe that our Constitution is inspired and that it is based on principles that are timeless and universal. This is the reason why 95% of all written constitutions throughout the world...
Great touch is often written off simply as 'talent,' which is crucial, because a good swing can take a golfer only so far. I've seen thousands of fantastic swings in my day, but that doesn't guarantee anything.
I edit as I write. I revise endlessly. I don't go forward until I know that what I've written is as good as I can make it.
I did a weird thing when I was about 24. For four years I had written quite a lot of poetry, and I started reading through it and thought some of it was really good. So I burnt it all.
Fiction is the thing I esteem most in my own work; I feel that, even if it's no good, only I could have written those books.
'Restaurant Man' is kind of the story, an unabridged story of what happened in my life, the good bad and ugly. Some people might glean some life lessons. It is honest, not written as a press release.
I've written enough books with real celebrities, such as Walter Payton and Hank Aaron and Billy Graham, to know that fame looks good only to people who don't have it.
I have definitely written a happy song about someone and then we ended up splitting up, but you have to put those kind of things to the back of your mind and tell yourself that it's a good song and it works on the album.
You need the past as a guideline. The history of music is a good basis, but to escape that stuff, that tortuous rulebook, you have to learn it first. It's kind of like religion - once you've written the Bible, that's it, move on.
It's easy to get published once you have written a really good book and the hard part, 99 percent of what you need to worry about, is really finishing it.
Action is greater than writing. A good man is a nobler object of contemplation than a great author. There are but two things worth living for: to do what is worthy of being written; and to write what is worthy of being read.
If people stop being interested, it's because you haven't written a good enough album. Music will always be the most powerful thing. It doesn't matter what record labels or journalists say. It's the song.
And then the really awful thing is that at the end of the day after crying and experiencing things, then you look at what you've written and you're like, 'Hmm, there's half a page that's good here.' Then you throw out everything else.
If you look on Amazon - if you do a search for personal finance, there are literally 20,000 books written on personal finance, and there's no real reason for it. I mean, personal finance is pretty simple.
If the Indian people want stories written about themselves, how they want them told, they are going to have to make them, they're going to have to finance them. If you let Hollywood do it, Hollywood is going to get it wrong most of the time.
The vehemence with which certain critics have chosen not simply to criticize what I've written, but to challenge my writing this story at all, speaks of what the book is about: fear of disapproval.
I, for one, find writing excruciating. Some mornings, as I'm on my way to my desk, my hands actually tremble with fear. The fear, of course, is that I'll sit down at the desk and discover that what I've written is claptrap. Fear inevitably leads to p...
I don't know the literary world; I was scared of being confronted with famous names, not knowing what they had written. It was occupied territory I was entering.
