Unhappy and unsettled childhood helps in writing.
When I'm stuck in my writing, the world is amiss. If I'm eating a sandwich, it's an unsettled sandwich. If I'm in the shower, it's an incorrect shower. It's profoundly uncomfortable. But it's what keeps me pushing.
There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire writing process.
I started writing because there's an absence of things I was familiar with or that I dreamed about. One of my senses of anger is related to this vacancy - a yearning I had as a teenager... and when I get ready to write, I think I'm trying to fill that.
I think the crucial thing in the writing career is to find what you want to do and how you fit in. What somebody else does is of no concern whatever except as an interesting variation.
Writing music is such a freeing exercise, and it's really nice to play in that world of being confident, vengeful - getting back at all the bad boyfriends.
What interests me is what you might call vernacular writing, writing that connects you to a place.
I've written so many verses and keep on writing so many more that I became afraid that if I didn't write them into one big book, I might forget some of them.
I've always had rock star envy. Unfortunately, writing is a pedestrian, tame occupation done while sitting in coffee-stained pajamas in front of a computer rather than prowling around a huge stage in sweaty leather pants, so I have to get my kicks vicariously.
I write from this tight third-person viewpoint, where each chapter is seen through the eyes of one individual character. When I'm writing that character, I become that character and identify with that character.
Whatever I'm writing has seemed to be about something I don't feel I could freely express in my everyday life, and stand-up is a really effective medium for getting people to hear exactly the things and viewpoints that they normally don't want listen to.
Virginia Woolf came along in the early part of the century and essentially said through her writing, yes, big books can be written about the traditional big subjects. There is war. There is the search for God. These are all very important things.
When I began, the guitar was en-closed in a vicious circle. There were no composers writing for the guitar, be-cause there were no virtuoso guitarists.
I can't imagine writing a screenplay where I didn't feel deeply connected at some kind of visceral level to the material.
Cheever constantly voiced doubts about his writing. Reading 'The Naked and the Dead' made him despair of his own 'confined talents.'
One of the reasons I love writing for middle graders, besides their voracious appetite for books, is their deep concern for fairness and morality.
I come by writing dialogue fairly naturally, I've got a chatty family; I'm a bit of a voyeur, and if I'm ever in a public place, I automatically find myself listening.
When writing, I split my time between my chambers and my satellite office: my neighborhood Chick-fil-A. It offers the word-nerd trifecta: I bring Bose headphones; they provide Wi-Fi and waffle fries.
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
I wasted time writing films. I don't look back on those years as lost, but it wasn't what I should have been doing.