When making the first album, I think I wrote a song about every six months. The first album was so much about the vocals carrying it.
If you want to put out a song that you wrote yesterday, tomorrow go on Twitter, type in a new URL, and give it to the people!
I was always bossy as a kid. I made my friends do shows that I wrote and would take them on tour from house to house.
Do you know why Albert Camus was so prolific? He wrote to keep from screaming.
The idea that I wrote something that stood for the way I feel about things, and that it lasts, that's probably my favorite thing that I've done.
When I want to put out an album, I want to write it. I want to be able to say that I wrote my album, and all this stuff is from me.
I've found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it.
I saw I could rhyme words. It came simply to me. But I wrote some pretty horrible songs that I still have on tape.
Being a bestseller doesnt mean they wrote a great book. Just means they knew a lot of people who would buy it.
I wrote five issues of that and got the sack. Actually, they paid me for eight, but they changed their minds about the direction and threw three issues out the window.
I might do my own independent film, that my husband wrote for me, if all the ducks are in a row.
When I wrote the song, The Way It Is, I wanted to move people to take a stand on civil rights in this country.
I read the three 'Hunger Games' books in a week and because I liked them so much I wrote 'Just a Game.'
When Ronald Reagan was elected I was on a bus traveling with a band in France. I wrote a little arrangement of The Star Spangled Banner in a minor key.
The songs of Bizet are by a French peer of Rossini. When Rossini stopped composing, he was living in Paris. He also wrote some beautiful songs in French.
Basically, that's why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself.
I spill it out as fast as I can. I don't really edit. In Brazil, recently, I wrote 70 pages. In London, 80 pages.
I wrote for a weekly magazine and then edited a literary magazine, but I did not really feel comfortable with the profession of journalism itself.
I wrote six pilots, none of which ever got picked up. When you stop trying, it then it falls in your lap.
I don't see myself as the boss. I sing and write the songs, and it would feel strange if somebody else wrote the lyrics I sang.
For the novels I wrote before selling anything, I didn't outline much. I had a vague idea of the story.
