Until 1954, I'd only ever thought of being a painter, but I earned my money when and where I could. You could say I drifted into writing.
I am a drinker with writing problems.
As a high-school drop-out, I knew I wanted to write, but I wasn't overly confident that I was going to be writing anything serious. I was happy enough with the idea that I could be a penny-a-word guy and survive.
I took up writing to escape the drudgery of that every day cubicle kind of war.
When you write, it's making a certain kind of music in your head. There's a rhythm to it, a pulse, and on the whole, I'm writing to that drum rather than the psychological process.
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
When a series is doing well, it's very tempting to keep writing it, even when the creative well is drying up. It's tempting because that's where the money is. I've had to be very careful; as soon as I think I'm getting close to that dry well, I wrap the series up. I don't want to just keep writing something because it sells.
When I first began to write, I was writing on bass, because I was thinking more Public Image, more dub.
I'll keep writing 'Dune' books as long as my mother's spirit continues to support the project.
I started playing video games, and in 1978 I discovered Dungeons & Dragons and started game-mastering and writing my own adventures and creating my own worlds.
I started writing and acting in these little plays and then I was discovered by Dustin Hoffman. He got me my first audition for a film he was in, called 'I Heart Huckabees.'
I've had a lot of writers, in particular, who said they got into writing because of the 'Van Dyke Show.' They said it looked like fun.
I've been interested in writing and storytelling since I learned to read, but it wasn't until I read Dylan Thomas, when I was 14, that I became interested in language itself, and saw it as more than a transparent medium for a story.
Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.
My early life had a lot to do with my origins as a writer, but I didn't get into doing any writing at all until I was about 35 years old.
In my twenties and early thirties, I wrote three novels, but beginning in my late thirties, I wearied of the mechanics of fiction writing, got interested in collage nonfiction, and have been writing literary collage ever since.
Pretty much my whole life, I've been a performer and have loved singing and writing songs in my room for my own ears.
Hard writing makes easy reading.
Writing in modern Hebrew is a bit like playing chamber music inside a huge, empty cathedral. If you are not very careful with the echoes, you may evoke some monstrosities.
There's an ecstatic side to writing. It's like jazz. It just has a life.
