People weren't even aware that I wrote my own songs. The media just promoted me as a female body. It's like I've had to prove that I'm an artist.
Originally, when I wrote the song 'The Sensual World' I had used text from the end of 'Ulysses.' When I asked for permission to use the text, I was refused, which was disappointing.
I write in a journal first, briefly. Then read something I've read many times before, for about half an hour, then rework what I wrote the day before.
I wrote 'Ava Wrestles the Alligator' when I was 22 or 23. These people and that world have been evolving in me for a while. It's such a shift not to be in that world.
I took lots of photographs and had planned to write a treatise on how it worked, but I quickly got bored with that idea and wrote a scientific fairy tale instead.
I wrote the first draft of 'Madame Bovary' without studying the previous translations, although I gathered them and took the occasional peek.
Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.
Mozart wrote so many works in his thirty-five years that it would take a lifetime just to write out the notes. We literally do not know how he did it.
In writing a little tragedy, 'The Gaol Gate,' I made the scenario in three lines, 'He is an informer; he is dead; he is hanged.' I wrote that play very quickly.
I've written virtually as long as I've acted, it wasn't a sudden transition. I acted in my first play when I was 16 and I wrote my first play when I was 17.
There is something so hopeful about a diary, a journal, a new notebook, which Joan Didion and Virginia Woolf both wrote about. A blog. Perhaps we all are waiting for someone to discover us.
I actually wrote my first zombie book way before I got the job on 'Saturday Night Live.'
Once in 1919, when I was traveling at night by train, I wrote a short story. In the town where the train stopped, I took the story to the publisher of the newspaper who published the story.
In 1962 I wrote for 'Jazz News,' using the pseudonym Manfred Manne, which I picked because of a jazz drummer with that name. I later dropped the 'e.'
In Australia, I wrote lots of little plays and put them on, and then I worked on a few different TV shows, like the Australian equivalent of 'SNL.' I would write and perform all of my characters.
I wrote 'The Hunger Games' in a chair, like a La-Z-Boy chair, next to my bed. I had an office, but my kids sort of took it over.
In the early 1980s, I wrote a book called 'The Complete Guide to Financial Privacy.' If I would write that book today, it would be a pamphlet. There is precious little privacy left.
I think there's a poet who wrote once a tragedy by Shakespeare, a symphony by Beethoven and a thunderstorm are based on the same elements. I think that's a beautiful line.
The Founders didn't mention political parties when they wrote the Constitution, and George Washington in essence warned us against them in his Farewell Address.
The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.
While I was writing I assumed it would be published under a pseudonym, and that liberated me: what I wrote was exactly what I wanted to read.
