I don't see myself necessarily having a burning desire to write a symphony.
I would be pleased if someone would invent a pill to remove my impatience, moodiness, and occasional bursts of anger. But if they did, I wouldn't be able to write my novels or paint.
I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I'd just write.
I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen.
In my early twenties, that's when I really began to write. Before that, I was too busy working, keeping myself going.
When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
I have notebooks all over the place. I write little stories for my cabaret.
Sometimes I write captions on the in-flight magazines and then replace them in the seat pocket.
Today, I'm very careful not to mention very specific locations when I write or give captions.
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.
I was 17 when I decided to write stories as big as cathedrals, overflowing with the kind of memorable and audacious characters Walker Percy, Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow created.
I think every band is a little cautious when the drummer starts to write tunes.
I know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship.
I'd like to produce, direct, write, score, and star in a film in exactly the way Chaplin did. I'll do that before I'm thirty.
When I write, I try to become different characters.
I used to write books and plays in my mind, but I doubt that any of them would have been above the level of the cheapest dime novel.
I think that the stuff I write for pop music is terribly, terribly cheesy.
What an author likes to write most is his signature on the back of a cheque.
I want the last cheque I write to bounce.