'Somebody That I Used to Know,' like a lot of the record, was a bit of a struggle to finish. It was written fairly quickly - I wrote it in November 2010 - but it took six months to find Kimbra and really realize she was the right vocalist to make the...
I've been a Mac guy for almost my entire adult life. I wrote my first college papers on a typewriter, but by the end of my freshman year - almost 20 years ago - I was on an IBM PC. Then, in 1984, I found the Mac, and I never looked back.
I remember lying on the floor of my room, staring at a black-and-white television for most of the '80s - watching 'Diff'rent Strokes,' 'Facts of Life,' 'Silver Spoons,' Saturday morning cartoons, and 'Murder, She Wrote' while eating an insane amount ...
The book, you understand, was not written for publication. It was the portrayal of my emotions, the analysis of my own soul life during three months of my nineteenth year. I wrote then all the time, just as I do now, but, though the book is in diary ...
I was headed in the wrong direction. I didn't think I'd make it to 21. My Uncle Chuck saved my life. He was a graphic designer, and he gave me my first sketchbook. In the front, he wrote, 'Wear it like your underwear.'
I met Magnus Lidehall about two years ago, and the beat that I originally wrote 'Younger' on was one of the first ones that he sent me. I must have been around 21 at that time, feeling a bit lazy and disappointed with myself and my life.
We're talking about, essentially, the Roman historians, who wrote Cleopatra into the story mostly so that they could talk about the rise of Rome. And that is one of the problems, of course, in recounting her life. She's only ever apparent to us when ...
I wrote my first sucio story, as I call them, in 1997. This was always my 'cheater's book,' my book about sucios desgraciados. My plan was to write a book about how people deal with love and loss.
I love rare books. Not that I own a lot of them, mind you. You couldn't quite call me a rare-book collector. But I did once work in a rare-books library, and I wrote a novel about a rare book.
Oh, friend, forget not, when you fain would note In me a beauty that was never mine, How first you knew me in a book I wrote, How first you loved me for a written line....
God has, in fact, written two books, not just one. Of course, we are all familiar with the first book he wrote, namely Scripture. But he has written a second book called creation.
You know when I really realized like 'wow' what a gift this is was when I sang at camp and a girl wrote me a letter and said the song that I sung kept her from committing suicide.
To say that my existence is entirely inconsequential is to utterly ignore the amazing reality that life is a masterful story penned by a brilliant God who wrote me into the story in such a way that my absence would literally diminish the whole of the...
I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces.
I wrote my first short story for a competition and won second prize. Another competition came up and I won first prize. The first story was published in a newspaper. The second went out on radio.
When writing the constitution for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, John Adams wrote: I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading.
Seem to be telling this, but really telling that. Three-dimensional writing, like three-dimensional chess. Nabokov was the other master of that. You could learn something from Nabokov on every page he ever wrote.
The first couple of pictures I wrote and directed were dreadful, because I was dealing in worlds that were not familiar to me, and writing about fantasy. They were just not anything I was really connected to.
Maybe one day I'll make a record that's really mysterious and no one knows where it came from or what I wrote it about. But thus far, I've just wanted to explain everything properly.
It just so happens that I was born and raised in Washington. Had I been born in Chicago or San Antonio, the streets and places would have figured into whatever I wrote. Just so happens that it's Washington, D.C.
One of the first papers I wrote at the University of Wisconsin, in 1977, was on stem cells. I realized that if I changed the environment that these cells were in, I could turn the cells into bone, and if I changed the environment a bit more, they wou...
