Nobody ever wrote down a plan to be broke, fat, lazy, or stupid. Those things are what happen when you don’t have a plan.
My first real break was when my college sketch troupe, The State, was asked to contribute pieces for a new MTV show called 'You Wrote It, You Watch It.'
I'm not expecting the American literary community to welcome me with open arms. To them I'm just some schmuck kid who wrote some book.
In the Emperor's New Clothes, they got a different celebrity to do each voice. They drew up a picture of each character and then each actor wrote their own part.
Twitter is so short, it's safe. I don't want my bosses to be like, 'Hey, your script is due and we saw you wrote four blog pages.'
The only joy I had was writing what was. That book was. It no longer amuses me to be all the things I was when I wrote that. But it is my story as I was then.
Over a four-month period, I sat down and wrote every day. And then there was a novel, and all of a sudden, there were agents and offers.
An editor is someone who is paid to tell a writer what she thinks about how he wrote what he thinks about.
I started off as a journalist when I was young and I did not get paid unless I wrote three stories a day.
People are quite shocked when you remind them that Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra never wrote a song that they recorded in their lives, as far as I know.
See, I never wrote arrangements for the band for Judy Garland; I did strictly special material, special lyrics, put together all of her medleys.
I never fantasized or invented a thing, not one thing. I knew every single thing I ever wrote about.
Aristotle wrote the 'Poetics' 2,400 years ago. It's really an instruction manual for aspiring filmmakers. It's as valid today as it was then.
My first celebrity crush was Jonathan Brandis. I even got to talk to him on the phone. I wrote a fan letter, and he answered. Talk about a surreal experience.
I wanted to figure out how long to cook things. I did some experiments and then wrote a program using Mathematica to model how heat is transferred through food.
In my particular instance, I came from a family that didn't have anything. Everything I earned in life I made. Myself. With songs that I wrote.
Mozart often wrote to his family that certain variations or sections of pieces were so successful that they had to be encored immediately, even without waiting for the entire piece to end.
Michael came home and asked, Would you like to write a song with me? I got this idea for a title called A Kiss at the End of a Rainbow. So we had a couple glasses of wine and wrote it.
'Peace Train' is a song I wrote, the message of which continues to breeze thunderously through the hearts of millions. There is a powerful need for people to feel that gust of hope rise up again.
Mother humor is such a universal theme. I wrote a show called '25 Questions for a Jewish Mother.' I had people coming up to me after the show saying, 'I'm Baptist, and my mother is just like yours.'
I'm a novelist first, and I wrote a bunch of books, and everything I write, I just find people are more interesting when there's an element of humor to it.