I love writing essays and articles, so it's hard for me to resist taking assignments that inevitably pull me away from larger projects.
The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock - shock is a worn-out word - but astonish.
In writing 'A Portrait of Athens' I have attempted - rather impressionistically - to give a panorama of its present. But I have also brought in its past because I sincerely think that there is a continuity.
I started writing regularly for 'The Atlantic' roughly around the time that Barack Obama got inaugurated.
In writing a weird story, I always try very carefully to achieve the right mood and atmosphere and place the emphasis where it belongs.
Creative writing and shooting are muscles that atrophy. But when you work them, you become a self-generator who can branch out.
With so many young playwrights, the true craft of writing for living voices is not what it used to be. They write for attention spans of 10 minutes between adverts.
I believed that writing my story was my best shot to be able to pay my mom and my attorneys back and pull myself out of this massive crisis that I had put myself in.
The thing I am attracted to is just good writing and stories that are based somewhat in reality.
I always tell audiences when I talk about writing: Writing isn't something I do; writing is something that I am. I am writing - it's just an expression of me.
I've always loved Jane Austen's writing.
Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen.
The earth is ready, the time is ripe, for the authoritative expression of the feminine as well as the masculine interpretation of that common social consensus which is slowly writing justice in the State and fraternity in the social order.
I've been interested in autism since I've known about it, which is more or less since I've been writing.
All through my writing life, I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.
I had several publishers, and they were all the same. They all wanted salacious. And everybody is writing autobiographies, and that's one reason why I'm not going to do it. If young Posh Spice can write her autobiography, then I don't want to write one!
My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.
The mainstream of literary culture in the U.K. is very averse to writing about technology.
And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.
I had been writing songs for awhile - since I was 14 - and playing guitar, but I never really knew how to go about making an actual career.