There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare.
As autobiographical as say the stuff on 'Rumours' was, I don't think we thought of it as such when we were writing it.
I love writing sad songs.
I write about heartbreak because I like writing about sad things, but I'm writing happy songs, too!
After I finished my first draft of 'Salvage the Bones,' I felt that I wasn't political enough. I had to be more honest about the realities of the community I was writing about.
I didn't even realize I was writing songs - I thought I was just being witty and sarcastic.
I liked Sartre's views but not his writing.
I'm crushed by the responsibility of writing a satirical book.
Writing went from being a calling to being a job. Business ruined things. It became like making sausages in a sausage factory.
Writing, and its theatre of operation, is better than working shifts packing frozen sausages; that's all I need to think about if I'm having difficulties.
It really wasn't until I was in college when I began to write more and more, and I realized I was scheduling my entire life around my writing.
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
It's hard writing screenplays.
The whole process of making movies and writing screenplays is visceral and intuitive.
I've been working with a lot of people out in Hollywood on writing scripts, screenplays, directing, producing, and making music.
My approach to making movies is different than other people, because I just write a lot of screenplays. I'm constantly writing screenplays.
'The Fourth Hand' was a novel that came from twenty years of screenwriting concurrently with whatever novel I'm writing.
Writing a whole series was a crash course in screenwriting, which is a very different muscle to standup comedy writing.
I often attribute my screenwriting to journalism because they drill in the who, what, when, where and why - but we really need to land on that why. That's what I've been exploring in my writing for many years and trying to get better at.
As a rule, I think people in L.A. are interested in any writer who brings a different skill set and experiences. There's an attraction to novelty and to anyone whose writing isn't based in screenwriting. I had that novelty.