I cannot find a faithful message-bearer," he wrote to his friend, the scholar Atticus. "How few are they who are able to carry a rather weighty letter without lightening it by reading.
When we write, we complement each other. We wrote six songs, Barry and I, while Robin was ill during the American tour, and they were terrible until Robin came back, and then everything worked out.
I try to catch flies in cups and put them outside. After I wrote 'The Underland Chronicles'... well, once you start naming cockroaches, you lose your edge.
I've always been a bit of a space geek. I wrote an article years ago about the neutral buoyancy tank, which is this biblically sized pool where they train astronauts. And it was just the coolest thing.
A lot of people think I came out of nowhere. When you start as a songwriter, nobody knows who you are. I met the guy who wrote 'Yeah' by Usher, which was a huge smash, and nobody knew who he was.
As a teenager I wrote to R.A. Lafferty. And he responded, too, with letters that were like R.A. Lafferty short stories, filled with elliptical answers to straight questions and simple answers to complicated ones.
I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.
No, I just thought of a story and wrote down what I saw. It was about two kids in Ireland who went around killing people. It was called Travelers, and it was made as an independent film.
I've had three novels published, and I was working a little bit in theater in Ireland. I wrote one film script just to see what it would turn out like.
As soon as I was old enough to drive, I got a job at a local newspaper. There was someone who influenced me. He wrote a column for The Guardian from this tiny village in India.
It definitely helps to have the acting experience going into singing, because when you're singing, you have to portray the emotion you were feeling when you wrote the song. They're the same thing, in a way; it's expressing your emotions through words...
When I wrote 'Fast Food My Way' in 2004, I hoped that my friends would prepare my recipes. Now, more people cook from that book than any other I've written in the past 30 years.
When I wrote 'The Interestings,' I wanted to let time unspool, to give the book the feeling of time passing. I had to allow myself the freedom to move back and forth in time freely, and to trust that readers would accept this.
When I was very young, I used to share much of what I wrote with my family, but as I got older and more self-conscious, it became a much more private process.
I didn't have my own journals, but my mother kept a journal while I was in the hospital, and my father wrote newsletters to keep friends and family updated on my progress.
I suppose that one of the reasons I wrote 'In Contempt' was because of the money. After the trial I came to realize that there were things that I needed to do if I was to protect myself and my family, so there were some selfish reasons for it.
Madly, futilely, I wrote novel after novel, eight in all, that failed to find a publisher. I persisted because for me the novel was the supreme literary form - not just one among many, not a relic of the past, but the way we communicate to one anothe...
Once I had all the facts in, I found I didn't have the immoral courage to pull the caper. So I wrote it as a story. As a teenager, I didn't have any skills for writing as such, so it came out in 1500 words.
When I wrote 'Silver Linings,' I thought I was writing a book about the Philadelphia Eagles and male bonding, but when the book came out, it was surprising to me that the mental health community embraced it.
After I left the Pumpkins, I went home and just sat around. I have a studio in my basement, and I found myself writing all these songs, just taking advantage of the relaxed situation. I wrote about 30 songs in about 30 days.
I wrote a play once called 'Lobby Hero,' which I thought turned out very well, but there's no final version of it. I published the one we produced, but there are seven other versions with different variations sitting in my desk at home.
