Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write.
I've given up email. Well, almost. At the weekend I set up one of those auto-reply messages, informing my correspondents that I would no longer be checking my emails, and that instead they might like to call or write, as we used to in the olden days.
I have never felt inhibited in trying to write as well as the greatest English poets.
Customary though it may be to write about that institutionalized pastime as though it existed apart from the general environment, my story does not lend itself to such treatment.
I don't think about the styles. I write whatever comes out and I use whatever kind of instrumentation works for those songs.
I consider plot a necessary intrusion on what I really want to do, which is write snappy dialogue.
I couldn't ever write a straight crime novel: there'd be an intrusion of weirdness at some point.
I write heavily under the influence of James Taylor.
Paul McCartney and John Lennon would often write a song a day, so I have the same workmanlike philosophy.
That's my favourite stuff to write about: my journeys and the people I meet - especially the kids.
I got put on jury duty, which is where I learned how to write.
Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.
When I was 21, I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for 'The Simpsons' who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
Every time I write 'Stephanie Plum', it's going to be Katherine Heigl's face there.
When I was about 14, I got a tacky keyboard for 250 pounds and put on a drum machine and found I could write a song.
It has taken Thomas Harris 11 years to publish the sequel to 'The Silence of the Lambs,' which suggests that while everyone was desperate to read it, he was not desperate to write it.
I write with a pen and paper. Never on a laptop.
I wanted to write about what we were doing at the French Laundry, the recipes and the stories.
I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I'm a writer... I write.
