I like 'Bewitched' off the first album because it's one of the happiest songs I've ever written and, as any writer will tell you, happy songs are a million times more difficult to write than sad songs.
All of the narration in 'Smile' is first-person. Most of the books that I grew up reading had first-person narrators for some reason. My diaries were written in this voice, and since this story is autobiographical, it just felt like a natural extensi...
I don't think the western world is questioning capitalism. Capitalism as a concept is not something that society has written off. But today, there is degree of caution around capitalism. We believe in compassionate capitalism. Growth for growth's sak...
I think that enduring, committed love between a married couple, along with raising children, is the most noble act anyone can aspire to. It is not written about very much.
I love form, but I'm not interested in forms. I've never written a sonnet or villanelle or sestina or any of that. For me, it's a kind of line. It's a rhythm. It's something musical.
I find the songs I want to record by listening to as much music as I can. 'When I hear things I really like, I ask the writers to send me a tape of everything they've ever written.
Most of my early records were not cohesive at all, just collections of demos recorded in different years. 'Odelay' was the first time I actually got to go in the studio and record a piece of music in a continuous linear fashion, although that was wri...
Well when I was young, when I was very young, when I was a little boy I don't remember the music I heard, but there was an article in the Brooklyn Daily written by my Aunt about how I could choose phonograph records.
But I always held my music up and protected it from compromise. So I just do it for my friends. I've written hundreds of songs, and I'm sure I have a few albums worth of songs.
In the U.K., classical music is composed by individuals and written down. Indian music is based on certain sequences called ragas. When I perform live, 95% of the music is improvised: it never sounds the same twice.
Another thing that's quite different in writing a book as a practicing newspaperman is that if you look at what you've written the next morning and you think you didn't get it quite right, you can fix it.
He had written my mother once that he wanted her to be the first thing he saw every morning and the last thing he ever saw. And that's how it turned out.
You'll see that the strong, the affirmative, the positive voice in any of the plays I've written is that of a woman. My men are, well, not quite worthless, but they are certainly weak, and that reflects the reality I grew up with and what I think has...
I've written a couple of scripts. Actually, a pilot. I'm not sure I'm allowed to say, but it's a comedy about three young men in New York City, one of whom may or may not be a romantic like me.
I think women in pop have been declawed and defanged, and they're just meant to look pretty and sing pretty. You don't really hear a female perspective on the radio, because so many of the songs are being written by men.
After my mom died, there was so much written about her fashion and her style and all that, and I felt that one of the most important parts of her was missing, her real intellectual curiosity.
But I don't think there has ever been anything written on the nature of violent man as deep and as thorough as Shakespeare's Titus. I think it puts all modern movies and modern exploitations of violence to shame.
In anything I've ever written, all the characters sound like me, which I don't think is a bad thing. It makes sense. But I had always admired filmmakers who made movies that didn't sound like them at all.
I met the Colonel when Elvis was recording some song I'd written for one of his movies. Elvis was just having fun with the gang and all the Memphis boys and Colonel Parker was sitting over here in like a theater seat.
I like doing films and I wish that I could do more but I still have to audition. I don't get offered starring roles in movies even though I've written and starred in a movie.
Vance: [reading a card that Tom has written] Roses are red, violets are blue... Fuck you, whore!
