I'm not fond of biographies. I don't like writing about myself.
For me writing biographies is impossible, unless they are brief and concise, and these are, I feel, the most eloquent.
Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.
Writing is like sewing together what I call these 'buttons,' these bits and pieces.
I started writing an album on flights to Africa and Brazil, but it was crazy because I left the notebook on the plane. It had seven or eight songs in it. After that, I'm not writing any more songs on notebooks - and I keep my Blackberry close!
The hardest thing about writing, for me, is facing the blank page.
In the end, I am quite normal. I don't have odd habits. I don't dramatize. Above all, I do not romanticize the act of writing. I don't talk about the anguish I suffer in creating. I do not have a fear of the blank page, writer's block, all those things that we hear about writers.
The writing process is the time where nothing's been set in stone. It's a blank slate, or a blank page.
I don't have one favourite spot - I love writing anywhere that I feel inspired. I have to admit that I do love getting cosy in bed or under blankets on the sofa and writing from there.
Teens want to read something that isn't a lie; we adults wish we could put our heads under the blankets and hide from the scary story we're writing for our kids.
We bled writing these songs, we bled in the studio, and now we're out bleeding getting them right live.
I have read books that are so cliched and lazy, my eyes have bled. But I also have read books marketed under the chick-lit umbrella that are so honest, clever and gritty that I've wanted to give up writing and paint walls instead.
When I was writing my first novel, 'Where the Line Bleeds,' which had young black men as its main characters, I was very invested in telling the story and also very worried about the effects the story would have.
Writing rap songs is about flow, about one word blending seamlessly into the next and creating a thing that is possible to perform in a way that feels natural.
There are different rules for reading, for thinking, and for talking. Writing blends all three of them.
It's often hilarious to me that I'm writing about Tonga or some tropical place and there's a blizzard outside and the cows are on their backs with their hooves in the air.
When I first started writing for television in the seventies and eighties, the Internet didn't exist, and we didn't need to worry about foreign websites illegally distributing the latest TV shows and blockbuster movies online.
I've been blogging since February of 2001. When I started blogging, it was a dinosaur blog. It was me and a handful of tyrannosaurs. We'd be writing blog entries like, 'The tyrannosaurus is getting grumpy.'
I've been writing since I was very young, even before I was a teenager. As far as I'm concerned, I am a writer - whether my writing's spoken or written in a blog, paper, book or printed on the side of a submarine.
