Schopenhauer wrote that to desire immortality is to desire the eternal perpetuation of a great mistake. He was correct.
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
I was afraid I wrote neither well enough nor ill enough for success.
Love, I wrote the book on it. Unfortunately, nobody would publish it, so I felt compelled to burn my manuscript.
Bookshop Customer: 'Who wrote the bible?' Customer's friend: 'Jesus.
I'd like just to be remembered as a guy that came along and did his music, did his best and showed up on time, clean and ready to do the job, wrote a few songs, and had a hell of a time.
From the moment I wrote 'Leaf Storm' I realized I wanted to be a writer and that nobody could stop me and that the only thing left for me to do was to try to be the best writer in the world.
The best novel I wrote was one called 'Crusoe's Daughter,' which never won any prizes. But I was getting somewhere in that. I'm not sure I have in any of the others.
I started putting down my own pen and spending some time searching for the best songs out there possible. It doesn't matter if I wrote them or not.
Were there stories I wrote along the way that were terrible clinkers? God, yes. But they were all a product of their time, and I did the best I could.
Anyone who knows the history of the Pete Best Band or the Combo, we were on the verge of breaking in in America. In the mid-'60s, I had great songwriters; we wrote some great stuff.
For what I wrote that started this whole controversy, I deserved to be criticized, and I felt bad about writing it. I felt bad mainly as a writer and a thinker.
I wrote a lot of plays when I was little, and I made everyone in the neighborhood perform them with me. I was probably a really annoying friend to have when I was little.
It took me years of attempts and failed drafts before I finally wrote the elegies I needed to write.
Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them.
The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library,'The medicines of the soul.
Christ himself wrote nothing, but furnished endless material for books and songs of gratitude and praise.
I always was a writer, but then I wanted to do stand-up because I thought that was a way that I could perform what I wrote.
I'm such a fan of Daniel Waters, who wrote the script, and also Mark Waters, his brother, who directed. 'Vampire Academy' has, I think, an iconic director.
First of all, Shakespeare is about pleasure and interest. He was from the first moment he actually wrote something for the stage, and he remains so.
I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since.
