Top 575 Wrote Quotes

In this post, you will find great Wrote Quotes from famous people, such as Caroline B. Cooney, Taylor Swift, Moby, James Welch, B. D. Wong. You can learn and implement many lessons from these quotes.

I wrote eight full-length adult novels in my twenties.

I wrote eight full-length adult novels in my twenties. None of them were published.
Caroline B. Cooney
‘Mean’ is a song I wrote about somebody who wrote things that were so mean so many times that it would ruin my day. Then it would ruin the next day. And it would level me so many times, I just felt like I was being hit in the face every time this person would take to their computer.
If you look at someone like Joe Strummer or John Lennon, when you heard their music you knew that they wrote it and they cared about it.
I wrote a lot in study hall to while away the hours.
James Welch
I’m a strong nonbeliever in the Christmas letter where you don’t really read it because it’s just full of kind of meaningless information. It doesn’t really resonate to the person reading it, but it means so much to the person that wrote it.
Madly, futilely, I wrote novel after novel, eight in all, that failed to find a publisher. I persisted because for me the novel was the supreme literary form – not just one among many, not a relic of the past, but the way we communicate to one another the subtlest truths about this business of living.
William Nicholson
Being a young black man, observing and sensing the need for race equality and women‘s rights, I wrote about what was important to me.
Here lies a plain and simple Jew who wrote in plain and simple prose.
In my late teenage years, I developed a real passion for it, and wrote a lot of poetry.
I wrote ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ at the age of 30 under intense, unshared personal stress and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the guise of a junior diplomat at the British Embassy in Bonn, I was a secret to my colleagues, and much of the time to myself.
In my final year at Bristol University, I wrote a play called ‘White Feathers.’ It was produced in the studio theatre at the studentsunion in early 1999, when I was 21. It’s 100 pages long: a very traditional play, with an interval, about deserters in the First World War.
But even before that, in 1980 I went so far as to write a book about what had happened. And I wrote all about the bank robbery, I went ahead and printed it even though I had no use immunity for it.
I wrote ‘Me and Ma’ to celebrate a beautiful phase of my life with people.
I was on ‘Murder She Wrote’ with Angela Lansbury. She was fantastic… she was lovely to everyone, she was always on time, prepared. Whereas when I worked with Bob Hope, he didn’t know his lines. He had to have these huge big cards… he hardly said two words to me all day.
English is taking over the world. I just wrote a piece about it. And it’s not by design. The United States dominates because it’s the biggest market.
Norman Spinrad
On a shelf above my computer are five letters that spell out W-R-I-T-E. Just in case I forget why I’m there. I also have ‘Wonder Woman‘ paraphernalia from when I wrote five issues of the comic, and pictures of my husband and kids.
Boulez seemed to me to be a guy who wrote laws. Like a company lawyer.
Luc Ferrari
We just wrote songs that seemed good to us. We wrote the album in like two weeks. We could have had more time, but we accomplished what we needed to in the two weeks.
The first rap that I wrote was about my Maths teacher, and as expected, he didn’t like it, but the students loved it!
One lady wrote me and told me how she wants to see me get beat up and near death and that kind of stuff.
We stand on our songs and we stand on the songs that we wrote for other people. That gives us a higher platform.
Valerie Simpson
But John Landis wrote a good relationship which is really what the film’s about. A very straightforward young woman who’s very sure of herself and she meets a young man who needs some taking care of.
Jenny Agutter
The tune ‘All My Friends,’ we recorded because our friend who wrote the song, Scott Boyer, passed way, and Gregg Allman had passed and he had recorded the song on his first solo record.
‘Peace Train‘ is a song I wrote, the message of which continues to breeze thunderously through the hearts of millions. There is a powerful need for people to feel that gust of hope rise up again.
I wrote my epitaph: He started out a particle and ended up a wave.
I wrote my first song at 12 and remember someone asking, ‘What were you going through at 12 that you could write about?’ I get what you’re saying, but 11, 12, 13 were the hardest years of my life. You learn everything. You learn how horrible things feel.
The first comedy screenplay that I wrote was Animal House and I always thought I could and should be a director but no one was about to give me that opportunity on Animal House.
Although Bill Finger literally typed the scripts in the early days, he wrote the scripts from ideas that we mutually collaborated on. Many of the unique concepts and story twists also came from my own fertile imagination.
Bob Kane
When you say ‘I wrote a program that crashed Windows,’ people just stare at you blankly and say ‘Hey, I got those with the system, for free.’
Every time I wrote fiction, I was discouraged, and every time I wrote nonfiction, I was encouraged.
I was a little concerned that a lot of people thought I wrote Merchant Ivory movies. I also thought if I was ever going to write something strange and difficult, that was the time.
I like the guys who wrote their own stuff and were able

I like the guys who wrote their own stuff and were able to perform it, like Seth Rogen. He popped off so young. When he did ‘The 40-Year-Old Virgin,’ and he was a co-producer on the movie, I was like, ‘Oh my God: that’s exactly what I want to do.’
I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
I feel relief after the transfer window is closed. I got tired of reading and listening every day about me leaving or staying at Liverpool. Everyone wrote ‘Dejan is here, Dejan is there,’ and they knew nothing!
The first thing I wrote was a one-act play that got accepted at a one-act play festival, and I was in it along with Nathan Lane and a couple of other very good actors.
Screwing things up is a virtue. Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can’t read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.
When I wrote the song, I had the sea near Bombay in mind. We stayed at a hotel by the sea, and the fishermen come up at five in the morning and they were all chanting. And we went on the beach and we got chased by a mad dog – big as a donkey.
Ray Davies
My favorite song that I wrote is ‘Love Line.’ This was my first song that I wrote lyrics for, and I really wanted to express the feeling when you’re in love and hoping the other person feels the same way.
When I sat down and wrote the first paragraph, I was like, ‘Oh, I can go with this.’ I didn’t do an outline. I didn’t do anything. I just wrote sentence by sentence, not knowing where the story was going.
Colleen Hoover
So, how to stay inside the world of entertainment without actually getting another job? I felt the only logical answer was to become a novelist. So I wrote the first book – driven by some very real feelings of desperation – and it worked.
I wrote ‘Actor’ all on the computer. I didn’t touch any instruments until I was in the studio. So while I had all these ornate arrangements, I didn’t have any songs.
I knew at the time that that wasn’t the part I would be doing, they just wanted a screentest so they could have a look at it to show to the directors and producers. Then they wrote a part for me or maybe they already had it in mind, I don’t know.
Dannii Minogue
Homer was able to give us no information relating to the truth, for he wrote of human rather than divine things.
Oh, yes, we were on location with Another Man’s Poison, which I wrote for Bette Davis.
Val Guest
I wrote most of these songs right before the end. A lot of these songs are about that. Even if it’s not direct, you can feel the beginning of the end of the breakup in these songs.
Gene Ween
Of the first seven novels I wrote, numbers four and five were published. Numbers one, two, three, six, and seven, have never seen the light of day… and rightly so.
Sue Grafton
The fact is, when I wrote ‘Juno’ – and I think this is part of its charm and appeal – I didn’t know how to write a movie. And I also had no idea it was going to get made!
The fate of the singers who, like my songs, went up in flame was also the fate of the books which I later wrote. All of them went up in flame to Heaven in a fire which broke out one night at my home in Bad Homburg as I lay ill in a hospital.
Shmuel Yosef Agnon
I’d gone to Oxford to do graduate studies in the history of the slave trade, but I came across Georgiana’s letters, gave up that thesis, and wrote one on her instead. When I learned that Georgiana’s great-nephews supported opposite sides in the American Civil War, I knew this would be the perfect sequel.
It was my 16th birthday – my mom and dad gave me my Goya classical guitar that day. I sat down, wrote this song, and I just knew that that was the only thing I could ever really do – write songs and sing them to people.
When I was a kid, I wrote music – from the age of 11 until the age of 18.
Harrison Birtwistle
From the moment I wrote ‘Leaf Storm’ I realized I wanted to be a writer and that nobody could stop me and that the only thing left for me to do was to try to be the best writer in the world.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that when you look into the darkness of the abyss the abyss looks into you. Probably no other line or thought more inspires or informs my work.
As for action movies, I did Tarzan, and I’m also about to shoot Meltdown, which John Carpenter wrote.
Casper Van Dien
When I read Andrew Motion’s biography, I wept. It’s something about the purity of the story and how fresh it was because of the love letters Keats wrote.
When I wrote ‘East,’ I wanted a completely earthy, very sexy, very violent play, so I wrote in verse. I found it not only satisfying but releasing. It gave me an opportunity to play with language. We never played the characters like the yobs that they are, but rather in a slightly heightened way.
When I was in sixth grade there was a talent show, and I wrote my first sketch, ‘The Dentist.’ I played the dentist, and I had my friend play a patient. It was sort of what can go wrong at the dentist, and I just remember I had lots of fake blood and everything.
At last, the newspapers discovered the Bears. I kept writing articles about upcoming games, and by reading the papers, I learned editors like superlatives. I blush when I think how many times I wrote that the next game was going to be the most difficult of the season or how a new player was the fastest man in the West.
George Halas
‘The Big Lebowski’ was something we wrote for Jeff Bridges, and we set it aside for a couple of years because he wasn’t available.
I wrote two novels about a yoga studio in Los Angeles published by Penguin under the pen name Rain Mitchell.
I know people who have written big hit country songs that are really kind of terrible songs, but for the rest of their life, they’re the guy who wrote that. You’ve got to be careful; if you don’t want that to happen, don’t write those songs.
I was probably 35 when I wrote the first story. The voice is kind of a mix in that it has a young voice, but it’s also someone who’s looking back. I like that kind of double vision.
Denis Johnson
I got this idea about being afraid to let go of somethi

I got this idea about being afraid to let go of something and being afraid of sinking into a state of almost anesthesia, where you have to trust other people. Just the paranoia of it all. And it seemed to suit the frenetic track. So I just wrote it out and, you know, said it.
Nick Rhodes
People have said things about me, and wrote and criticized me about things in the past, but it goes in one ear and out the other.
I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order.
I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization.
When I wrote songs like ‘Everyone I Love is Dead,’ I never thought about how I was going to execute them live.
When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn’t make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn’t make a phone call. So for six years I didn’t make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.
I remember little of the Yukon or what I wrote there.
Robert W. Service
I wrote most of ‘Hello in There’ in a relay box, which looks like a mail box, only bigger. Sometimes, it was so cold and windy on my mail route that I’d go inside the relay box and eat a sandwich, just to get away from the wind. I remember working on ‘Hello in There’ inside the relay box.
Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.
My first album after ‘American Idol‘ I did with Desmond – we paid for it together, and we literally were together working on it every day for a year and half, just writing. We wrote in New York, Nashville, L.A., Sweden – we wrote with some other amazing songwriters like Diane Warren, too.
Ace Young
Writers are frequently asked why they wrote their first book. A more interesting answer might come from asking them why they wrote their second one.
Len Deighton
In ’57, I got a job at the Blue Angel nightclub, and a gentleman named Ken Welch wrote all my material for me. I lived at a place called the Rehearsal Club that was actually the basis for a play called Stage Door.
The universe is a symphony of strings, and the mind of God that Einstein eloquently wrote about for thirty years would be cosmic music resonating through eleven-dimensional hyper space.
I write from my imagination, not from what I’ve read in books or seen on TV or to make money. I wrote from an idea I was passionate about.
I knew that collaborating on songwriting would be difficult for a lot of people, because I was known very much, for my independence and the fact that I wrote these quirky songs that were not typical structure, not typical sound – you know, really original stuff.
The very paradigm of revolution, of right versus wrong, good versus bad, is a relic with no bearing on the present. Yet artists, exhibitions, and curators valorize the sixties. People who wrote about these artists 30 years ago still write about them in the same ways, often for the same magazines.
But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions, wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English, a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a long time.
George Saintsbury
Tonight I am going to take a party to the headquarters of the fire department, where I have a cinch on the captain, a very nice fellow, who is unusually grateful for something I wrote about him and his men. They are going to do the Still Alarm act for me.
Every article I wrote in those days, every speech I made, is full of pleading for the recognition of lead poisoning as a real and serious medical problem.
Alice Hamilton
I wrote the song For A Dancer for a friend of mine who died in a fire. He was in the sauna in a house that burned down, so he had no idea anything was going on. It was very sad.
I wanted to have a body of work behind me before I wrote about racism.
I wrote ‘Channel Orange‘ in two weeks. The end product wasn’t always that gritty, real-life depiction of the real struggle that happened.
I’ve written on public matters, but I don’t understand how anyone could tout me as a possible poet laureate when I wrote a poem on the abdication of King Charles III or about the sex life of the Royalsanybody who knew my work would know I’m not a contender.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
If you wrote a novel in South Africa which didn’t concern the central issues, it wouldn’t be worth publishing.
Alan Paton
Oh yeah, I was one of the first guys writing comic books, I wrote Captain America, with guys like Stan Lee, who became famous later on with Marvel Comics.
Mickey Spillane
So I think it was a good thing It was a little surreal watching Leo scream ‘I’m not going to die today!’ with our music playing – that was the last thing on my mind when I wrote the song.
My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.
I believe that the Framers of the Constitution made their intent clear when they wrote the First Amendment. I believe they wanted to keep the new government from endorsing one religion over another, not erase the public consciousness or common faith.
Coming back to the topic of computer security, the TCP Wrapper is an example of such a safety net. I wrote it when my systems were under attack by someone who appeared to walk through walls.
Wietse Venema
When I was 5, my mother threw a party, and a friend and I wrote and performed a play called The Dutch Doll.
I was sad Jon Ronson, who wrote in the Guardian and has

I was sad Jon Ronson, who wrote in the Guardian and has made a TV show for Channel 4, took against me.
Jonathan King
Stephen Sondheim told me that Oscar Hammerstein believed everything that he wrote. So there’s great truth in the songs, and that’s what was so wonderful to find.
In 1976 I wrote a lot about women trying to claim the right to work.
I wrote a query letter to an editor – a friend of a friend. The editor called me an idiot, told me never to contact an editor directly, and then recommended three literary agents he had worked with before. Laurie Fox was one of them, and I’ve never looked back.
At ‘SNL,’ I wrote political stuff, but I never felt the show should have an axe to grind. But when I left in ’95, I could let my own beliefs out.
I said, other people can write songs, let’s see if I can. So the first 400 or 500 wound up on the floor somewhere. Then I wrote one called Melissa.
Every word I wrote in my book is documented, certified, true, and correct. The truth wins, and that is my picture.
I was separated from my wife at the time. A lot of people think I wrote it about prison.
Freddy Fender
As soon as I was old enough to drive, I got a job at a local newspaper. There was someone who influenced me. He wrote a column for The Guardian from this tiny village in India.
I’m a big fan of Woody Allen. I used to love the fact that he wrote his own screenplay and acted in the movie.
When I look back at my career as an author, I don’t look at the first book that was ever published as to where my career began – I look to the first book that I ever wrote.
Jarrett J. Krosoczka
I wrote every day. I don’t think I could have written ‘Just Kids’ had I not spent all of the 80s developing my craft as a writer.
My mother was an actress in comedies. My father wrote scenarios. They were not opposed to my being an actor. I really didn’t know what it meant, but I wanted to be one anyway.
Jean-Pierre Leaud
It was like a dream come true for me. When you write the book, it’s still intimate. It might have been a best-seller but it’s still my story, as I wrote it. The moment we or they make a movie, it’s not my story anymore. There’s a lot of letting go involved in the process.
When I was like 22 years old, I wrote this bible for a Sunfire series. So, Sunfire is actually one of the members of the first X-Men team, and he’s a Japanese mutant who got his powers from a young age and grew up in an environment raised by his uncle to hate America.
All my life, I have taken inventory at intervals. For example, when I became a movie actor and suddenly I had to deal with fame, money and playing so many roles, I lost myself. I said, ‘Who am I?’ And I wrote my first book to deal with that, ‘The Ragman’s Son.’
I did The ‘Acid Test’ at the Royal Court, by Anya Reiss, who’s the most wonderful, amazing female writer. She was only 19 when she wrote it. She wrote it about three girls in a flat on a Friday night, and that was magic because it was so rare to have three girls in your age group in a play. It just doesn’t happen.
I wrote ‘Time of the Dark’ in 1978 and ‘The Silent Tower‘ in 1984, so the thing that sticks out for me is how totally technology has changed. I suppose that’s the great peril for real-world crossovers.
Barbara Hambly
I’m not expecting the American literary community to welcome me with open arms. To them I’m just some schmuck kid who wrote some book.
My second play, The Birthday Party, I wrote in 1958 – or 1957. It was totally destroyed by the critics of the day, who called it an absolute load of rubbish.
No, I just thought of a story and wrote down what I saw. It was about two kids in Ireland who went around killing people. It was called Travelers, and it was made as an independent film.
I wrote a book of essays about New York called ‘The Colossus of New York,’ but it’s not about – you know, when I’m writing about rush hour or Central Park, it’s not a black Central Park, it’s just Central Park, and it’s not a black rush hour, it’s just rush hour.
Danny and I wrote 10 songs in seven days, which I thought might be close to the record until you probably look at some of the Beatles statistics.
Jerry Only
I was always writing for myself. I wrote what I needed to write and hear – that’s what makes it powerful.
I didn’t write this song. Someone was talking in a room. I just wrote down everything they said.
Reign‘ – and this might sound cheesy, but it’s a dream I had. I dreamt everything that happened in that song, woke up, and wrote the song.
I first wrote for adults, but when I started writing for young people, it was the most creative and liberating experience of my life. I was able to express my own deepest feelings far more than I ever could when writing for adults.
It’s called Sisters of the Winter Madrigal. It was interesting for me to see it done after so many years; because I wrote it and I didn’t realize what a rage I was in.
Beth Henley
I wrote Murder at the Windmill. And it was accepted and we made it and it was the first film I made with Danny Angel, well the only film I actually made… I made a lot of it at the Windmill itself.
Val Guest
It is the Constitution of the United States that has been undermined, undercut, and is under attack. It is the American people’s liberties that is in jeopardy. That is why I wrote ‘Losing America.’
Robert Byrd
I’d always liked to write, but I never wanted to be a writer, because it seemed a sissy occupation. It is. To this day, I find it terribly easy. And so, rather than trying to hunt up a text, I just wrote one.
Daniel Pinkwater
Some years ago, I wrote a book called the Emperor's New

Some years ago, I wrote a book called the Emperor‘s New Mind and that book was describing a point of view I had about consciousness and why it was not something that comes about from complicated calculations.
You know, one of the only times I ever wrote about art was the obituary of Warhol that I did for the Village Voice.
Back in high school, I wrote a novel about a character named Bart Simpson. I thought it was a very unusual name for a kid at the time. I had this idea of an angry father yelling ‘Bart,’ and Bart sounds kind of like bark – like a barking dog.
Growing up in Memphis and listening to all kinds of music and dreaming… So that was one of the first times I wrote a complete song and set it to music and the whole bit. From then on, I was busy with it.
William Bell
I wrote a novel about the combat experiences I didn’t have in Vietnam.
Tracy Kidder
I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy.
I was born left-handed, but I was made to use my other hand. When I was writing ‘Famished Road,’ which was very long, I got repetitive stress syndrome. My right wrist collapsed, so I started using my left hand. The prose I wrote with my left hand came out denser, so later on I had to change it.
I tweet myself and do all the Facebook updates. It started off with me wondering whether I was showing off and I was very careful about what I wrote.
I wrote my first book at 20, but my whole focus from about the age of 12 was to be a writer.
John Boyne
In the beginning, we had a great deal of freedom, and Jerry wrote completely out of his imagination – very, very freely. We even had no editorial supervision to speak of, because they were in such a rush to get the thing in before deadline. But later on we were restricted.
Joe Shuster
My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literaturescience fiction is written according to the science fiction method.
Frederik Pohl
I sang ‘O Holy Night’ with the Vatican orchestra, but also a Blake – a lullaby that William Blake wrote for the Christ child, and I set it to music, and the Vatican orchestra played the music.
Well, I think that when you direct a movie or write it. And in the case of the two movies I did, I wrote and directed, they occupy a special place for you.
I did write more mainstream stuff with DK. But you could always tell the records that I wrote in contrast with everybody else‘s because the format was a bit different. The harmonies were used in a different type of way. Way more metaphors in the mix.
I went to a large consolidated school in Appalachia. And I wrote the story when I was in the second grade and I took it up to the third floor to the school newspaper office that was written and edited by juniors and seniors.
Our founders got it right when they wrote in the Declaration of Independence that our rights come from nature and nature’s God, not from government.
I wrote a great deal… but very little of any importance; there are not more than four of five papers which I can still remember with some satisfaction.
G. H. Hardy
I was lucky enough to have the songs in my first show written by George and Ira Gershwin. Then Cole Porter wrote five shows for me.
Filmmakers and critics wrote about each other and sometimes very harshly. This no longer exists.
In New York I was always so scared of saying that I wrote fiction. It just seemed like, ‘Who am I to dare to do that thing here? The epicenter of publishing and writers?’ I found all that very intimidating and avoided writing as a response.
Someone wrote a piece about Henry Green in The Partisan Review that was so intriguing that I got one of his novels, Loving, I believe, which was the first that came to attention in the United States.
Terry Southern
You have discovered so much kindness and good will to those you thought were oppressed, and had no helper, that I am sure you will not despise what I have wrote, if you judge it will be of any service to them.
Certainly in the case of ‘Kill Your Friends,’ a book I wrote more than 10 years ago, I routinely meet interviewers who appear to know the book better than I do. But still, you have to talk about it.
I wrote ‘Kshana Kshanam’ with the one and only purpose of impressing Sridevi. ‘Kshana Kshanam’ was my love letter to her.
Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.
Morrissey wrote a really gorgeous song for me. I’m crazy for that man. And he thinks I’m hip!
I love rare books. Not that I own a lot of them, mind you. You couldn’t quite call me a rare-book collector. But I did once work in a rare-books library, and I wrote a novel about a rare book.
I have spent over 60 years bent over a guitar and to know that I wrote 70 compositions that masters have recorded, that makes me feel so good and full, and proud and thankful to the good Lord.
Jerry Reed
When I wrote the eight fairy tales that appear in ‘Horse, Flower, Bird’ I was working toward a completely new form of artistic expression, trying to create a new kind of tale that also felt vintage: innocent and childlike, but haunted. I tried to write a picture-less picture book.
My scripts, they’re pretty serious. I basically just describe stuff. I don’t put too many notes and letters to the editors. But when I wrote ‘KGBLT,’ in parentheses I wrote, ‘Well this is the best thing I’ve ever written. It will all be downhill from here. I’m so sorry for the rest of my career.’
I came up with a story and I wrote it.
E. L. James
When I wrote 'Dear Fatty,' I realised that sitting and

When I wrote ‘Dear Fatty,’ I realised that sitting and writing alone is an absolute joy.
I had this vivid dream and woke up and I wrote the ‘MyPillow’ logo all over the house.
I do want people to know that the songs that I wrote when I was with women were really about women. And the songs that I’ve written since have been fairly obvious about men.
The author O. Henry taught me about the value of the unexpected. He once wrote about the noise of flowers and the smell of birds – the birds were chickens and the flowers dried sunflowers rattling against a wall.
As a kid, I liked making up stories, and I wrote a story about a kangaroo and a bat with Christy Chang, and she went on to become a surgeon.
I think there’s a poet who wrote once a tragedy by Shakespeare, a symphony by Beethoven and a thunderstorm are based on the same elements. I think that’s a beautiful line.
Maximilian Schell
My next project will be a Christian album, another one. I wrote the songs for the ones you’re referring to, but I want to do some of my old gospel favorites. That’s what my next album’s going to be.
Charlie Daniels
I started to write in 2001. I wrote the books for the fun of it. It was an old idea I had had since the nineties.
Stieg Larsson
My earlier poems were sadder than my poems are today, perhaps because I wrote them in confusion or when I was unhappy. But I am not a melancholy person, quite the contrary, no one enjoys laughing more than I do.
When I wrote the Anita Hill book I believed everything I wrote was accurate.
I love the BlackBerry. I’m on it all the time. I literally wrote my whole book, ‘Unwrap Your Sweet Life,’ on the BlackBerry while I was working out on the StairMill. So many people tease me about having a BlackBerry, but I meet a lot of people who still use one. Obama has a BlackBerry!
But the law of God came from heaven indeed. God wrote it with his finger, it is the fountain of all wisdom, and therefore shall it continue for ever, and never have an end.
John Jewel
I wrote my first piece about the disruption of the Harvard Business School in 1999. Because you could see this coming. I haven‘t yet done the one about the disruption of the Stanford Business School.
The first book I ever wrote was in fourth grade and it was called ‘Billy‘s Booger.’ It was an autobiographical piece about a kid who was really bad at math.
William Joyce
If you wrote something, you deserve to get paid and recognized for your work. No one should take a bow with another man‘s hat.
Ronald Isley
I had no idea what I was doing when I wrote ‘Search.’ There was no carefully designed work plan. There was no theory that I was out to prove.
I never kept a diary, but I wrote detailed notes of my travels.
‘Rise Up’ is definitely my baby. I think it was a gift because, you know, it’s like God just spoke to me and wrote that song. It’s very powerful.
I simply went down there to catch up with an old mate of mine, who owns the place. He’s the one who wrote the book on the place, but no, no movie, just a beer.
Bryan Brown
From my anger, frustration, and hurt, I wrote the short story that would later become ‘The Hate U Give.’
A.J. Liebling, one of my heroes, used to say that he could write better than anyone who wrote faster, and faster than anyone who could write better. I’m one nine-hundredth as good as Liebling, but that principle may slightly apply.
That decision to commit your life to certain principles and a certain narrative, if I wrote a paper on that, I know I’d find inconsistencies.
I’m a huge fan of ‘Heart On My Sleeve‘ – I think it has a ‘Take That’ feel to it! John Shanks and James Morrison wrote the track, and we spoke to Sony and asked if we could reference a ‘Greatest Day’/’Rule The World’ sound to make that epic ballad. I think it does the job.
I’ve known those pieces ever since I was about 16 or 17; I also at that time was taken to meet Charles Ives whom I got to know fairly well. He was the one who wrote a recommendation for me to get into college.
I am not overlooking any mail. I’m looking at all of it. I even wrote back to the Viagra people.
Til 1983, I wrote primarily for other psychologists and expected that they would be the principal audience for my book.
As I wrote, I found that Aibileen had some things to say that really weren’t in her character. She was older, soft-spoken, and she started showing some attitude.
We lived on a farm in the English countryside, where we wrote a lot of our music. You really were treated like an artist during those days-not like product, which is now the mode.
The first song that I wrote was when I was with The Del Rios. I was like 14 years old but I was always putting my thoughts down on paper even before then because it was like an escape – a way of unleashing all the stuff.
William Bell
My sister and I wrote some songs together under a project called Sala Says Mhyp when I was 17. Sala is our cat. She died, and we wanted to do something in honor of our her. We were a proper cat family.
To me, Mozart is our Shakespeare, the one who wrote the most dramatic, psychologically most baffling music. He combined ideas that no one else would have thought of putting together.
I've always romanticized the late '40s and '50s - the c

I’ve always romanticized the late ’40s and ’50s – the cars, jazz, the open roads and lack of pollution. Now there are more vehicles, less hitchhikers, more billboards and power lines and stuff. People wrote wonderful long letters that took months to receive, and now everything is email.
The reporter wrote with the hope that he would get a by-line in the Times, a testimony to his being alive on that day and all the tomorrows of microfilm.
Gay Talese
There are stories still in existence that I wrote when I was five. However, I did not get published until I was seven.
Somebody wrote a script around us, but Dustin Abraham came with the best one.
Method Man
I worked initially in very low-budget independent films that I often wrote. My early work was all written by myself, and then I adapted ‘Tsotsi,’ so I was used to the writing process being, in a way, integral to my directing. I felt it really prepared me.
With ‘Brick,’ I wrote the script when I was 23 and didn’t make the movie until I was 30.
I have been forgetting things for years – at least since I was in my 30s. I know this because I wrote something about it at the time; I have proof. Of course I can’t remember exactly where I wrote about it or when, but I could probably hunt it up if I had to.
After we wrote The Wreckoning, our record label did listen.
Cole Porter wrote Anything Goes and four more hits for me.
I taught workshops at universities. I wrote for magazines. This took time and insane amounts of juggling, but it’s how I earned a living.
Cheryl Strayed
People like that I wrote a book – that’s cute, but oh, making a business out of it? That’s not nice.
I didn’t even walk for graduation – I did graduate, though. I got this homeschool deal. I didn’t have to go to school because I was depressed, and my mom wrote all these essays for me. I didn’t write one of them. She literally got me my diploma.
I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.
If I don’t relate to a song, I won’t sing it. The thing is that if I wrote it, I’m always going to relate to it.
I wrote music as soon as I knew notation.
Harrison Birtwistle
In his 70s, when I was in my 40s, my father still read me the stories he wrote about his childhood. His intonation, his pronunciation of Yiddish, our cackling at his jokes live on.
I wrote ‘Truth Is‘ with Julia Michaels during our first time working together. The song is about emotions we often think of but are afraid to voice – the feelings we try to convince ourselves we don’t actually feel.
I’m not sure if they do this in the States, but in Korea, until high school, on your graduation diploma there’s a line that states your future goal. Kids write ‘president‘ or ‘astronaut,’ or whatever. I always wrote ‘singer.’
Shakespeare and his work will always be relevant. He wrote those pieces hundreds of years ago and we haven’t really changed as humans, have we? We have to deal with love, honour and adultery now – people were the same then, too – that’s what’s so wonderful and powerful.
‘Band Played On’ is a good one. Barbara Orbison, who was Roy’s wife, was involved in publishing in Nashville because she oversaw Roy’s publishing, and she had a company in Nashville. She had a whole bunch of writers assembled, and they got together every day and wrote, and they write for everybody in Nashville.
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
For years I wrote in my basement. More recently I graduated to one floor above, an office with all my books and music and – ta da! – a window.
When I wrote my book I wanted to love someone. I wanted to be in love. Now I know that I shall never be in love – and I no longer wish to be.
I wrote the Brotherhood song for no money out of my deep feelings about humanity, and because I was flattered that whatever talents I had, had been recognized.
To the audience, it’s like I’m changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show’s almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.
I just wrote a book, but don’t go out and buy it yet, because I don’t think it’s finished yet.
I was a 16-year-old girl at one point, so of course I wrote poetry.
Read not Milton, for he is dry; nor Shakespeare, for he wrote of common life.
Charles Stuart Calverley
I don’t think that women necessarily always write like women. I was a writer on the ‘Comedy Central Roasts’ for a while, and I always wrote the jokes that people assumed the men would write.
Many voters think about the makeup of the Supreme Court when they are choosing a president. The justices deal not only with constitutional issues but also with social issues that were unknown to the founding fathers who wrote the Constitution more than 200 years ago.
As a children‘s author, reviewers are generally very nice to you. I only ever wrote one adult book and received such a kicking for it that I was in trauma for the next six months.
In that long sequence, when Lawrence enters in the dese

In that long sequence, when Lawrence enters in the desert to rescue a lost man, Lean listened the music I wrote and wanted to extend the scene to let my work stay completely.
Maurice Jarre
When I wrote ‘The West Wing,’ the juice behind it was that in popular culture, our leaders in government are generally portrayed as Machiavellian, or as idiots. I thought, well, how about writing about a group of hyper-competent people?
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
Look, in 1800 the sainted Thomas Jefferson arranged to hire a notorious slanderer named James Callender, who worked as a writer at a Republican newspaper in Richmond, Va. Read some of what he wrote about John Adams. This was a personal slander.
For years, I believed that anything worth doing was worth doing early. In graduate school, I submitted my dissertation two years in advance. In college, I wrote my papers weeks early and finished my thesis four months before the due date. My roommates joked that I had a productive form of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
I’ve done more crap than I care to remember. I really have. ‘Airwolf.’ ‘Murder, She Wrote.’ ‘Amazon Women on the Moon.’ But you learn from all these bad shows. What you don’t want to do and what you don’t want to be involved with.
I wrote for a weekly magazine and then edited a literary magazine, but I did not really feel comfortable with the profession of journalism itself.
The day Guy Clark passed away was the day we wrote ‘Girl Goin’ Nowhere.’ It was the first day I had met Jeremy Bussey, who I wrote the song with.
On that other novels followed: but I still wrote fairy tales and dreamy poems of another world.
I always wrote; my first story was published in the magazine The American Girl when I was 11.
Then there was Clark Ashton Smith, who wrote for Weird Tales and who had a wild imagination. He wasn’t a very talented writer, but his imagination was wonderful.
I lost my son in late 2011. He had been totally incapacitated from his neck down for the last eight years of his life, but his mind was alive and brilliant in those years. He even wrote a book, ‘Allegheny Mountain,’ lying at home in his hospital bed.
My very, very first professional job was when I was 19 years old – I got a job doing an educational industrial film on Shell Motor Oil’s oil products. I really put my heart into it – I wrote a script for it, I did a lot of research.
The book, you understand, was not written for publication. It was the portrayal of my emotions, the analysis of my own soul life during three months of my nineteenth year. I wrote then all the time, just as I do now, but, though the book is in diary form, it is not a diary.
Nabokov, who I loved more than any other writer when I was young, had such contempt for dialogue. When I was younger, I never wrote a word of dialogue because of him. I thought it was a childish part of a novel.
When India conducted nuclear tests in 1974, I wrote a letter to then-Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto from Holland and offered my services for Pakistani nuclear programme.
For me, being a writer was never a choice. I was born one. All through my childhood I wrote short stories and stuffed them in drawers. I wrote on everything. I didn’t do my homework so I could write.
But mostly, I wrote songs and Viv wrote songs.
Neil Innes
‘Reign’ is probably the oldest one on the record. I wrote that when I was 19. ‘The Dead They Don’t Come Back,’ which is the last song on the album, I wrote when I was 20, and ‘Harlem River’ I just wrote last year. It spans from 2007 to 2012.
When I wrote The Onion Field, I realized that my first two novels were just practice.
Joseph Wambaugh
I try to gauge whether a girl likes me before I make a move. I would write a page-long note to a girl. If she wrote a whole page back, I knew she liked me, too. If she wrote back like two words, then I figured I’d move on.
Devon Werkheiser
The area we define as what Quora’s good at is long-form text that’s useful over time, and where you care about who wrote the text. Not that you need to be friends with them, just that they’re someone trustworthy.
The fact that people are already reading and loving something I wrote is still hard to believe.
I produced and directed a movie a couple years ago that won some awards that Samuel Goldwyn released called ‘The Last Good Time‘. I wrote, produced and directed it, but I wasn’t in it.
I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors.
Before I started chemotherapy treatments, I wrote down the best advice from doctors, family, friends, books, and survivors and created an ‘Owner’s Manual‘ to help me take care of myself. It would remind me that cancer is doable.
I always sang standards because the songs I wrote for myself weren’t as easy to sing.
Morrissey wrote to me and said, I have a song for you and if we release it as a single, you’ll be on the charts for the first time since 1972, I said, what time, where?
It was only as I wrote about it that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.
Well, I came the second year. I mean I just fit right in. They wrote a great person and I’m so lucky that I got to be part of the family.
Aida Turturro
I wrote my first piano piece when I was in 4th grade.
Abel Korzeniowski
I'm astonished by my success. I wrote because I needed

I’m astonished by my success. I wrote because I needed to and wanted to. It never occurred to me that I’d become famous.
Well, if I am not vulgar, neither is my book. I wrote myself. Suggestiveness is always vulgar. But truth never. My book is not even remotely suggestive. I call things by their names. That is all.
I wrote the tunes and sang only nonsense words. Then came Moore and dressed them with the lyrics.
Rick Wright
There are some movie stars in Hollywood that are so scared, they also tell the reporter that they are recording them, in case there is something wrong with what they wrote about them in the papers.
I was five years old when I wrote my first song. It was out of longing for my father that I wrote it.
Shmuel Yosef Agnon
Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was.
Jackson Pollock
I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.
Possibly he knew, as he wrote this, that he was mad – because inside every madman sits a little sane man saying ‘You’re mad, you’re mad.’
I wrote my first real murder story as a journalist for the Daytona Beach News Journal in 1980. It was about a body found in the woods. Later, the murder was linked to a serial killer who was later caught and executed for his crimes.
‘Twenty One Pilots‘ is a play by Arthur Miller, who also wrote ‘All My Sons.’ It’s about a guy who’s creating and developing parts for airplanes in war time, when it comes to his attention that some of these parts were faulty.
Josh Dun
Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American.
I was just 20 years old when I wrote Broken Arrow.
You made a lot of mistakes, and you wrote a lot of crap. But it was all part of the learning process.
Cynthia Weil
Kickback is a police thriller which I wrote. I’m very proud of it. I did it in two parts for France because when I wrote it, there wasn’t the audience demand for crime stuff that there is now.
I don’t think people are fans of me because I wrote hit songs. I think they’re fans because I’m a lunatic or a weirdo. The hit songs came out of my idiosyncratic personality, not the other way around.
Only to he avoid misunderstandings, I must say that even last year, when I wrote my pamphlet, I heartily wished that Prussia should declare war against Napoleon.
Ferdinand Lassalle
I don’t think my wife likes me very much, when I had a heart attack she wrote for an ambulance.
Frank Carson
Technically, I’ve been retired for some time now. All I ever do is occasionally write songs for friends, such as one, for a friend who had just turned 80. I wrote a song for him called, The First 80 Years are The Hardest.
The history of exploration has never been driven by exploration. But Columbus himself was a discoverer. So was Magellan. But the people who wrote checks were not. They had other motivations.
I looked through our catalog year by year, and I saw that there were pockets of time when we wrote some terrific songs. Then all of a sudden, we’d go for another two or three months and there weren’t great songs.
Barry Mann
I’d like to be a student in Rabindranath Tagore’s school in Santiniketan in around 1915, dancing in the dance-dramas he wrote.
People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.
When Ronald Reagan was elected I was on a bus traveling with a band in France. I wrote a little arrangement of The Star Spangled Banner in a minor key.
Carla Bley
The Founders didn’t mention political parties when they wrote the Constitution, and George Washington in essence warned us against them in his Farewell Address.
Solace is my favorite song. It was the last song we wrote for the record. It was right when we really started to mesh as far as music goes and we started really connecting with each other.
Brandon Thomas
Every time there’s a revolution, it comes from somebody reading a book about revolution. David Walker wrote a book and Nat Turner did his thing.
I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.
If I wrote a musical it wouldn’t be about me. Although I do some magic, so it would probably be about a magician who appeared and re-appeared all over the place.
When I wrote ‘Lean In,’ some people argue that I did not spend enough time writing about the difficulties women face when they don’t have a partner. They were right.
When I was 21, I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for ‘The Simpsons‘ who’d briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.
What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.
This ceremony and the intellectual aura associated with

This ceremony and the intellectual aura associated with the Nobel Prizes have grown from the wisdom of a practical chemist who wrote a remarkable will.
Stanford Moore
I sat down one night and wrote the line rock, rock, rock everybody.
Bill Haley
I wrote ‘My Name is Red’ just to remember painting, where the hand does it before the intellect. When I’m captive to it, I’m a happier person. Kierkegaard tells us that a happy person is someone who lives in the present; the unhappy person, someone who lives either in the past or the future.
When people know I wrote ‘Thelma and Louise,’ they don’t want to mess with me.
If all I ever wrote about was inner city freaks, I think it would be dishonest.
Eric Bogosian
An English journalist called Michael Viney told me when I was 25, that I would write well if I cared a lot what I was writing about. That worked. I went home that day and wrote about parents not understanding their children as well as we teachers did, and it was published the very next week.
It was that famous joke: What’s the last thing the drummer said before he got kicked out of the band? ‘Hey, I wrote a song.’
I first got to know Charles in the late seventies when I wrote an article and then a book about him and I think at the time he came across as quite appealing, it was probably the height of his popularity.
But I would like to think that it’s the actor that makes the difference in these cases. Not the director, not the guy that wrote the book, not the guy that adapted it for the screen, but the actor.
Ray Walston
My grandmother passed at 104. She sang and wrote songs until she passed.
Rita Coolidge
The first novel I wrote was a monster – clocking in at 180,000 words – but it died a death, a death it deserved. It was called ‘The Gods First Make Mad.’ It was a good title, but it was the only good thing about the book. I didn’t let that put me off.
How do I let the director know how obsessed I am and willing to do anything for the movie? Like, I wanted to write this one director a letter, so I wrote him a handwritten note. But then I was like, ‘How many people are writing this guy handwritten letters? Is it going to seem cheesy? What do I do?’
When they wrote the Constitution, only white male landowners had the right to vote.
I figured somebody wrote a story who had a typewriter and I thought that movies were made by the cowboys and that they just said, ‘Okay, you fall off the horse this time.’
I write to be truthful in my songs, which is why I wrote what’s painfully truthful about my life in my autobiography.
I wish I wrote more about the world at more distance from myself.
Sharon Olds
If I want people to connect to my words and my stories, I need to tell them where they came from. Because then, when you break into song, they have kind of a blueprint for why I wrote that song, so they can come to it with something they went through that helps them connect to it.
My approach to recording and all that is pretty organic. It just has to do with all the songs I wrote; go in and record them.
When my first child was born in 1962, I wrote a letter to my grandfather telling him how happy I was but how concerned; concerned because there were so many visions which were not very good.
I know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship.
In my first book, Under Fire, I wrote that I revered Ronald Reagan. That was a dozen years ago. I still feel that way. I think he changed the world for the better for my children and my children’s children.
The first set of lyrics for the first songs I ever wrote, which are the ones on ‘Pretty Hate Machine,’ came from private journal entries that I realized I was writing in lyric form.
‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.
I have written a few children’s books. The first book that I wrote was for children. It was called ‘The Package‘, and it was a mystery story in pictures. It had no words.
Of course I danced a lot when I was making ‘Swingers.’ The swing music scene was big in Hollywood, and I went to places like The Derby. And, after I wrote it and was trying to get it made, I would go every week so I’d be good at dancing.
I was one of those dark, quiet kids that wrote poetry.
Which is a wonderful irony, I have property there. I go back every chance I get. One of the main reasons I actually wrote the book, agreed to write it having never wanted to do that in my life, very intimidating by the way to write a book.
If you’re writing an opinion piece, it’s your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions.
Right before I got ‘Sons of Anarchy,’ I actually quit acting for 18 months and didn’t read a single script, and I wrote a film. I felt like I needed to do something that I had control over, as an artist, and also just do something where I felt like I had some control over my life, as just a human, out in the world.
The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he’s written it.
My Brilliant Career was beautifully directed, but I had a bit of trouble with myself in it. It was a silly script, based on a book this 16-year-old girl wrote.
Judy Davis
It's just that what's important there is different ther

It’s just that what’s important there is different there than what’s important is here. Here, people care that you wrote a book or that you work in the media.
I wrote The Same Sea not as a political allegory about Israelis and Palestinians. I wrote it about something much more gutsy and immediate. I wrote it as a piece of chamber music.
I wrote my first books when I was single and then I got married and then had a kid and there were different things happening in my life.
I don’t think much of anything I wrote before the age of 30.
I wrote an article on a new Porsche for ‘Automobile Magazine.’ I knew the editor, and she asked me to write this article. So I’m more proud of that than anything.
Big Night and The Impostors are both things that I wrote.
I think I settled on the title before I ever wrote the book.
Well, I never got into the young adult headspace. With ‘Twilight,’ they are pretty adult themes, aside from maybe the first one, but even that. They’re very adult themes, actually, particularly as the characters age. I never wrote for young adults. I wrote for myself, as an audience.
I think I was 9, and my mom ordered them for me from a catalogue. They bred like crazy, and I was selling gerbils all around Michigan. They wrote a story about me in the local newspaper.
I wrote an essay about leaf blowers and the evil they do.
During the year 1894, Pierre Curie wrote me letters that seem to me admirable in their form. No one of them was very long, for he had the habit of concise expression, but all were written in a spirit of sincerity and with an evident anxiety to make the one he desired as a companion know him as he was.
When I wrote Living in the Light, I wanted to share about how I live my own life and to encourage people to tap into their own inner wisdom.
‘Dear Mr. Henshaw’ came about because two different boys from different parts of the country asked me to write a book about a boy whose parents were divorced, and so I wrote ‘Dear Mr. Henshaw,’ and it won the Newbery, and I was – it’s been very popular.
I wrote my own play, ‘The Westie Monologues,’ about where I’m from in Australia, and it was very successful. From that, I started getting offers from television.
Peter Breggin, an American psychiatrist, had been criticising SSRIs since the early 1990s. He wrote ‘Talking Back to Prozac’ (1995) to repudiate psychiatrist Peter Kramer’s ‘Listening to Prozac’ (1993) – a bestseller which claimed that Prozac made patients ‘better than well.’
John Cornwell
I’ve written a song for Prince. I never showed it to Prince, but just to see if I could do it. At the time, when I sort of knew him, he was recording a song a day. I wondered if I could do that. So I wrote it.
I might do my own independent film, that my husband wrote for me, if all the ducks are in a row.
Mike Campbell and Don Henley and I wrote ‘The Heart of the Matter,’ which was a huge hit for Don.
Epic started out with scripting languages in the first generation of the Unreal engine in 1998. I wrote that. There’s a place in my heart that comes along with the simplicity of programming in a scripting language.
I saw the Village as a place you could escape to, to express yourself. When I first went there, I wrote and performed poetry. Then I drew portraits for a couple of years. It took a while before I thought about picking up a guitar.
The problem was the journalists who also did not understand much of my music, but they wrote about it. I think you fell into the usual trap laid out by parts of the press and other writers: that the poor musician has always to fight the evil companies and managers.
Klaus Schulze
As soon as I began, it seemed impossible to write fast enough – I wrote faster than I would write a letter – two thousand to three thousand words in a morning, and I cannot help it.
Helen Hunt Jackson
‘Boyz-n-the-Hood’ was actually supposed to be written for Eazy’s group. He had a group out in New York called Home Boys Only, called HBO. One of them looked like LL Cool J. Eazy wanted to write a song for them, a street song, like what we were doing on the mix tapes. So when I wrote it, it was too West Coast for them.
Yea, I wrote my college thesis on why college athletes should get paid. I think there’s a way to do it based on the amount of revenue they generate.
I love all of my children equally, all of my printed books, and each one bears a special piece of me. But the one I’m most proud of is the one no one will ever see – the very first manuscript I ever wrote, back in 1990. It took me a year to do it.
Steve Berry
There’s a wonderful woodland, spiritual song I wrote in Undercliff in Lyme Regis, and I used to walk up there with my dog and always come back with an idea.
Christ himself wrote nothing, but furnished endless material for books and songs of gratitude and praise.
Philip Schaff
Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote!
Wilfred Owen
My theory is that I decided to be a writer when I was about seven, but of course it is not as simple as that. Like most writers, I had to work at other things to earn a living and wrote mainly in the evenings, often very late at night, for many years.
The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.
A. Whitney Brown
It takes me a long time to get with a landscape. It took me 20 years before I wrote anything about Ibiza, and I haven’t written about Oregon yet, although I’ve been there 20 years – possibly I’m almost due.
Robert Sheckley
And we had our own laws. I mean, I wrote them. And we h

And we had our own laws. I mean, I wrote them. And we had our own customs, and traditions, and proprieties.
I suppose I started writing seriously at 16 years old. I thought I wrote a novel at 16 and sent it to New York! They sent it back because it wasn’t novel.
Ernest Gaines
I wrote, exercised, ate healthy, and responded to life in prison very well.
Acting’s incredibly enjoyable, but sometimes it doesn’t feel quite enough. I’ve also written a script about the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine. This will make me sound like a female Kenneth Branagh, but I can’t think of anything nicer than directing myself from a script I wrote.
When it began I wrote this passionate letter to people I knew, studio members, of course, and other people with whom we have worked over the years and I said come and teach our students.
I wrote a script with my brother which ended up, somehow, on the Black List in 2008.
I probably wrote three-quarters of the songs without an instrument in my hands.
Richard Thompson
To my surprise, the more I searched about Qi Xiangfu, the more I found of a life lived partly online. He once wrote a short memoir in which he described himself in the third person, with the formality usually reserved for China‘s most famous writers.
Mozart wrote so many works in his thirty-five years that it would take a lifetime just to write out the notes. We literally do not know how he did it.
For example, after developing a sound similar to an elephant trumpeting, I wrote the song Elephant Talk which gave my elephant sound an appropriate place to live.
Adrian Belew
We hear about the Gershwins, the Kerns, and the Berlins, but there were some great little writers like Theodore Morse, Charles K. Harris, and Ernest R. Ball, who wrote ‘Let the Rest of the World Go By.’
‘Nation’ was one that I’d have killed myself if I hadn’t written it. It was absolutely important to me that I wrote it. It was good for my soul.
So this guy, Jeff Johnson, who is an accountant who cares nothing at all about a free press and cares nothing about journalism, he’s a right winger who supported the war, you know, who two years ago told people he couldn’t stand a word that I wrote.
I can never read this book, just like I can never see a movie that I wrote a screenplay for. I can read it and see it physically, but I can’t accurately judge it. I’m too close to it. If I read it ten times I’ll have ten different reactions.
Richard Price
If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it’s really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting.
Sharon Olds
I can only say thank you and thanks also to all of the great songwriters who wrote those wonderful songs that became number ones.
Yeah I do and I don’t mind, in fact that is one of the real encouraging things about this whole career of mine is that there are tunes I wrote almost thirty years ago that I will still play in front of an audience and I still like the old tunes.
Well, I actually wrote her a letter a couple of days ago congratulating her. The tone I tried to convey in the letter is, look, you are a part of a great American historical process.
I used the dictionary very minimally and I just wrote how I speak. And I speak very hateful manner usually. I constantly did that because I think the fans would get more out of it if they understood exactly what I’m saying – exactly where I’m coming from.
For me, the original play becomes an historical document: This is where I was when I wrote it, and I have to move on now to something else.
I didn’t want the headache of having a publisher reviewing everything I wrote in advance.
Mark Millar
I didn’t think anything I wrote was going to get published. I’m a dyslexic kid who had tutors through college. But I had a very strong impulse to write.
My mother wrote a teen column for the South China Morning Post in the 1950s when she was growing up in Hong Kong. Her name was Lily Mark, but she sometimes wrote under her confirmation name, Margaret Mark. That was how she met my father.
I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn’t realize then that it’s the same impulse. It’s make-believe. It’s performance.
I used to be a calligrapher for weddings and events – that was my side job while I was auditioning. I think handwritten notes are a lost art form. When I booked my first pilot, my dad wrote me a letter that I still have. The idea of someone taking the time to put pen to paper is really special.
My favorite is ‘The Last Coyote.’ I’m not saying that’s the best book I’ve written; I hope I haven’t written my best book yet, but that one was the first book I wrote as a full-time author, with my full-time focus. I have a nostalgic feeling about it.
Capote wrote every day. He said that’s the only way, you have to sit down every day and do it.
TV’s hard work. I don’t know how the hell Angela Lansbury survived doing ‘Murder, She Wrote’ all those years. And sure, everyone wants to be Bruce Willis or George Clooney – they want to be in film for the range of characters you get to play.
I wrote a few children’s books… not on purpose.
Of course, I’m older now. I’m in a different place in my life than when I wrote the songs for ‘Car Wheels‘ or ‘Essence’ or whatever. Different things were going on.
A number of former Wells Fargo employees have described their work environment characterized by intense pressure to meet aggressive and unrealistic sales goals. In a 2010 letter to shareholders, Mr. Stumpf wrote that Wells Fargo’s goal was eight products per customer because eight rhymed with great.
I wrote Steve Carell's last episode. I think it was a r

I wrote Steve Carell’s last episode. I think it was a really good episode, but there’s always a tension between what’s good for the series and what’s good for an episode, because the more closure you put on an episode, the more significant feeling it is.
Greg Daniels
Most people can’t tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can’t be related to other forms of historical poetry.
Of course, we wrote the songs accordingly and performed and recorded them that way. At that time, we really thought it was right, but you know, seen in retrospect, it made the album sound forced, and not really great.
Mark McGrath
I like to know that when I’m 90 years old, I’m going to be able to look at a song or poem I wrote and say, ‘Wow! I remember I was so crazy about this person,’ or ‘I remember what that day felt like.’
Writing about 2,000 words in three hours every morning, ‘Casino Royale’ dutifully produced itself. I wrote nothing and made no corrections until the book was finished. If I had looked back at what I had written the day before I might have despaired.
Ian Fleming
In some ways I think it would be very dignified if I went away for twenty years and then wrote my fourth book.
When we wrote the Constitution, the intention was to give the commander in chief the authority how to use the forces when you authorize him to be able to use the forces.
I write when the urge hits me, getting the words down as fast as I can type and then I step back from what I just wrote and start a dialectical process where I begin challenging my own writing.
Donald McKay
When I wrote ‘Fast Food My Way’ in 2004, I hoped that my friends would prepare my recipes. Now, more people cook from that book than any other I’ve written in the past 30 years.
I wrote several articles criticizing psychoanalysis, but the analysts weren’t listening to my objections. So I finally quit after practicing it for six years.
Ed Sheeran wrote his songs, so I wanted to write my own songs.
Sweden was very nice. I did a lot of television. I wrote, directed and was in a lot of television there.
Lee Hazlewood
I was headed in the wrong direction. I didn’t think I’d make it to 21. My Uncle Chuck saved my life. He was a graphic designer, and he gave me my first sketchbook. In the front, he wrote, ‘Wear it like your underwear.’
Part of what I loved – and love – about being around older people is the tangible sense of history they embody. I’m interested in military history, for instance, because both my grandfathers fought in World War II. I’m interested in writing because one of those grandfathers wrote books.
I was writing very early, like I was involved in our high school literary magazine, which was called ‘Pariah.’ The football team was the Bears, and the literary magazine was ‘Pariah.’ It was great. It was definitely a real sub-culture. But I wrote stories for them.
When I was sixteen or seventeen, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a playwright. But everything I wrote, I thought, was weak. And I can remember falling asleep in tears because I had no talent the way I wanted to have.
‘There’s nothing new under the sun’: that’s what you wrote, Ecclesiastes. But you yourself were born new under the sun.
I loved to write when I was a child. I wrote, but I always thought it was something that you did as a child, then you put away childish things.
When we started I wasn’t the singer. I was the drunk rhythm guitarist who wrote all these weird songs.
It was psychobabbler Abraham Maslow who wrote of the phenomena of self-actualization. What Maslow failed to grasp is that reaching true self-actualization can only be ultimately achieved when you have your own brand of ammunition.
I wrote a tennis book about Chris Evert and her then-husband, John Lloyd. It was called ‘Lloyd on Lloyd’ and became a No 1 bestseller.
Carol Thatcher
I save everything. I have these carefully organized file boxes. Somewhere in there is a section of the ‘New York Times‘ where I wrote ‘The Border Guard’ in the margin.
For me, and this may not be everybody, but because I do love country music so much, there’s such a feeling of home in Nashville, especially because it’s such a small town. You bring up one song, everybody knows who wrote it, everybody knows their mother and what their cell number is, and all of the stories.
But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.
You don’t think it was because a white man wrote it, a black man wrote it, a green man wrote it. What – doesn’t make a difference! Doesn’t make a difference. I think he did a good job.
Cab Calloway
I’ve got a role in the new Billy Bob Thornton movie that Billy Bob wrote and is going to direct called ‘Jayne Mansfield’s Car.’ I only have four scenes, but I have as much dialogue as anybody in the movie.
I was around computers from birth; we had one of the first Macs, which came out shortly before I was born, and my dad ran a company that wrote computer operating systems. I don’t think I have any particular technical skills; I just got a really large head start.
When I first got married to my husband, he had boxes full of photos of my two stepsons, ages 5 and 8 at the time, and I put them together in some little albums and wrote notes about how happy I was that they were a part of my life.
Nancy O’Dell
Growing up, I would watch a movie on video and would go to the back of the VHS and locate the address for Universal Pictures or MGM or whatever. I’d write to the studios asking them if I could be in a movie. They never wrote me back.
I guess if I wrote a book one day, it would be about hair.
‘Halo’ I wrote with my grandpa in his nursing home. When I went to visit him, he’d often comment on my halo. But of course, I couldn’t see. And he always – he had pictures of Jesus with these beautiful halos. And so I asked him if he’d write a song with me about Jesus’ halo.
My father has a book where, ever since I started playin

My father has a book where, ever since I started playing games… he wrote down the games that I played in. And then, when I did my website, we thought that was a really good idea, that people can keep track of my games.
When I record somebody else’s song, I have to make it my own or it doesn’t feel right. I’ll say to myself, I wrote this and he doesn’t know it!
When I wrote ‘Silver Linings,’ I thought I was writing a book about the Philadelphia Eagles and male bonding, but when the book came out, it was surprising to me that the mental health community embraced it.
Matthew Quick
With songs, it doesn’t matter what song it is; every time I go out and perform it, it’s like the first time I’m performing it, the first time I wrote it. If it’s not, then I’m not going to do it that night.
Marx and Lenin were ahead of their time. Marx wrote before offshoring of jobs and the financialization of the economy. Lenin presided over a communist revolution that jumped the gun by taking place in a country in which feudal elements still predominated over capitalism.
I’ve always thought that whether I’m writing or not, I’ve gotta pick the best songs, whether or not they’re mine. I’m not gonna sing them just because I wrote them. I’ve gotta find the best songs to make the best record I can.
I think I wrote the first draft of ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ in ’79. No one wanted to buy it. Nobody. I felt very strongly about it, so I stayed with it and kept paying my assistant and everything. At a certain point, I was literally flat broke.
I wrote ‘(‘Til) I Kissed You’ about a girl I met in Australia. Her name was Lilian, and she was very, very inspirational. I was married, but… I wrote the song about her on the way back home.
Don Everly
I never wrote. I also never really thought about being an actor. But when it was time to go to high school, we couldn’t afford private school, so I tried out for all the special schools in New York.
Jennifer Salt
I just wrote what I felt like writing since they seemed to sell.
A lot of women wrote to me. Some wrote me long letters on the meaning of the circle and about mythology and about motherhood and the significance or the symbolism of the mermaid and the frogs and the turtles.
It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.
I wrote a novel about Israelis who live their own lives on the slope of a volcano. Near a volcano one still falls in love, one still gets jealous, one still wants a promotion, one still gossips.
At the time I wrote Xone I had never been on the Internet.
Modern scientific knowledge appeared piecemeal. Historians wrote about human history; physicists tackled the material world; and biologists studied the world of living organisms. But there were few links between these disciplines, as researchers focused on getting the details right.
John Muir, the famous naturalist, wrote in his journal that you should never go to Alaska as a young man because you’ll never be satisfied with any other place as long as you live. And there’s a lot of truth to that.
I have been called ‘The American De Maupassant.’ Well, I never wrote a filthy word in my life, and I don’t like to be compared to a filthy writer.
O. Henry
I’m an actor who they said was wrinkled and balding and everything else when I was in my early 30’s. Most of the people who wrote that who thought they were younger than me are now bald and wrinkled.
I wanted to share my doubts and my culinary, amorous, and cosmic experiences. So I wrote ‘Like Water for Chocolate,’ which is merely the reflection of who I am as a woman, a wife, a mother, a daughter.
When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval.
Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.
While Fledging is a different type of book, The Parable series serve as cautionary tales. I wrote the Parable books because of the direction of the country. You can call it save the world fiction, but it clearly doesn’t save anything.
I was just learning to play guitar when Tracy Chapman came out. She wrote these songs, she played them by herself and I so admired her for that.
Madeleine Peyroux
I think we have a great deal of mythology around writing. We believe that only a few people can really do it. I wrote a book called ‘The Right to Write.’ In it, I argued that all of us have the capacity to write. That it’s as normal to write as it is to speak.
I wrote a book called The Taste of New Wine because I couldn’t find a book that talked about the reality of the situation and how we were dishonest and afraid.
Keith Miller
I wrote because I needed to and wanted to. It never occurred to me that I’d become famous.
Initially, I’d written a normal love song. Later, I wrote Corona Kannala.’ I say cheesy because we used a lot of contemporary references.
If I wrote a play with four characters every single one of them would talk like me regardless of age or sex.
Once I was condemned to three months’ absolute silence. As I could not speak, I wrote a book.
Nana Mouskouri
I wrote ‘Buried Child’ in a trailer at an old ranch house we had in California.
Jim Morrison wrote the words for ‘Hello, I Love You‘ when we were still in a band called Rick & the Ravens.
For what I wrote that started this whole controversy, I

For what I wrote that started this whole controversy, I deserved to be criticized, and I felt bad about writing it. I felt bad mainly as a writer and a thinker.
As I wrote about my childhood, I realized that there was no big tragedy. Being multiethnic is not a tragedy. I didn’t have any big life-threatening illnesses, no tumors, no kidney malfunctions… I came from a very poor family. I was chubby as a kid.
Amy Hill
And that’s how I wrote to NICAP, but then later, just very soon after that, like three weeks later, we started getting phone calls from government agents.
When we wrote ‘Next Girl,’ I was like, ‘Wait a minute, this is what I always wanted to do.’
I wrote ‘Legends of the Fall’ in nine days, but I had been thinking about it for a few years.
When the Exxon Valdez spilled in 1989, I was angry. I even wrote on the back of my car, Boycott Exxon!
Alexandra Paul
When I started out, I wrote the songs, recorded the songs, mastered, mixed, did the artwork, made the packaging and did the distribution, all myself. Now I understand what everyone’s jobs are, who is doing them right, and who isn’t.
Aloe Blacc
‘Rent’ was a special project for me. It was my first notable screenplay job. I worked with two wonderful directors on it, starting with Spike Lee in the summer of 2001. I wrote a draft for Spike and he was really good to me.
I’ve always loved ‘Umbrella.’ Funny enough, my ex-husband wrote that, and I’m not saying it was meant for me or anything – people will start twisting this – it is Rihanna‘s song! But I’ve always loved it.
I’m sure you’re aware, with the time it takes to put these books together, everything can suddenly start coming out at once even though I wrote anything between one and five years ago.
Mozart often wrote to his family that certain variations or sections of pieces were so successful that they had to be encored immediately, even without waiting for the entire piece to end.
Emanuel Ax
More than fantasy or even science fiction, Ray Bradbury wrote horror, and like so many great horror writers he was himself utterly without fear, of anything. He wasn’t afraid of looking uncool – he wasn’t scared to openly love innocence, or to be optimistic, or to write sentimentally when he felt that way.
The first couple of pictures I wrote and directed were dreadful, because I was dealing in worlds that were not familiar to me, and writing about fantasy. They were just not anything I was really connected to.
It’s not fair that people wrote that all of my films had not done well. There were a few films like ‘Nippu,’ ‘Devudu Chesina Manushulu’ and ‘Sarostaru’ which were really bad. But, ‘Veera’ and ‘Dharuvu’ had done well. Strangely, people have added them to my ‘flop list.’
I wrote in the ‘War of Art’ that I could divide my life neatly into two parts: before turning pro and after. After is better.
Steven Pressfield
I’m a black Catholic raised in Decatur, Georgia, which was very gang-infested. Then, I went to an all-white private high school and excelled in sports and wrote poetry, then played football at the University of Georgia, minoring in drama.
Whites were the winners, blacks were the losers, we wrote the history books, and they didn’t feature.
Phillip Noyce
I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I’ve never stopped writing since.
Sue Grafton
The Room I wrote in 1957, and I was really gratified to find that it stood up. I didn’t have to change a word.
Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.
I’m obsessed with ‘Thelma and Louise,’ and therefore obsessed with Callie Khouri who wrote that movie.
Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.
I wish I was a prolific writing wondrous boy genius – I wish I was Stevie Wonder – but I wasn’t. I was me. I wrote terrible songs about girls I was head-over-heels about. As soon as a pretty girl looks at me, that’s it – I’m in love, and I should probably write a song about it!
In my own defense, I wrote a one-man show, and that to me was more where I fit.
Take any writer you want in the 19th century: they wrote with quill pens, dipping a piece of goose feather in ink and writing. And yet we read those novels today, and if we’re sensitive to them, we respond to them with an immediacy that is stronger than anything written today on a word processor.
I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.
See, I never wrote arrangements for the band for Judy Garland; I did strictly special material, special lyrics, put together all of her medleys.
Mel Torme
And the irony is that they wrote better without access to my quotes.
Steve Carlton
There have been times I’ve planted stuff in songs where four years later I’ll be singing it from a subconscious, kind of chameleon little lizard mind… and at a certain moment, all of a sudden, I’ll hear a line from a different vantage point and it’ll change its meaning. It’s something I wrote but it changed because I did.
One of my favorite songs is ‘Ghost‘ by Indigo Girls. Emily Saliers wrote that, and she is one of the most talented songwriters ever.
Armenian folklore has it that three apples fell from He

Armenian folklore has it that three apples fell from Heaven: one for the teller of a story, one for the listener, and the third for the one who ‘took it to heart.’ What a pity Heaven awarded no apple to the one who wrote the story down.
Nancy Willard
The bands that wrote the big, heroic rock songs – I really wanted to make a record like that.
My older sister encouraged me from early on and bought me one of the first guitars I had. She listened to all of the crappy songs that I wrote when I was 8 years old and encouraged me to keep doing it.
I wrote things for the school’s newspaper, and – like all teenagers – I dabbled in poetry.
I am glad that I wrote something that brought joy to millions of people.
Albert Camus’s ‘La Peste’ – ‘The Plague‘ – had an enormous impact on me when I read it in high school French class, and I chose my senior yearbook quote from it. In college, I wrote a philosophy class paper on Camus and Sartre, and again chose my yearbook quote from ‘La Peste.’
In 2003, I wrote a New York Times best-seller called ‘Shut Up & Sing,’ in which I criticized celebrities like the Dixie Chicks & Barbra Streisand who were trashing then-President George W. Bush. I have used a variation of that title for more than 15 years to respond to performers who sound off on politics.
I had written a novel that was more of a classic linear novel, and I worked on it and worked on it for years, and it always seemed like it wouldn’t catch fire. At a certain point I just scrapped it all, and I kept maybe 15 percent of it, and I wrote those parts out on note cards.
Jenny Offill
What influenced me was Tori Amos, who was unapologetic about expressing anger through music, and Sinead O’Connor. Those two in particular were really moving for me, and very inspiring, before I wrote ‘Jagged Little Pill.’
I have been writing since I was about 20, and at first I wrote in secret and never showed anybody. I was very concerned about making a living, so I conducted.
In ’98, I locked myself in my house, went out of my mind and wrote 25 songs. I rarely bathed during that period of writing, I sent out for food, I didn’t really venture out of my house in three or four months. It was a hell of an experience.
Jerry Cantrell
New-Year’s Day arriving, and the ministers, to whom I wrote, remaining silent, I consider their silence as evidence, that they cannot prove what I said not to be from the Lord, and have therefore published as I was directed.
Joanna Southcott
You promised to take care of me and not to turn your back on me. How is it possible that you never wrote to me even once and you never came back to see me? Do you think that it is fun for me to spend months, even years, without any news, without any hope!
I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn’t that spectacular.
I had a notepad and I wrote down 30 things to make myself better just off the top of my head, and the next day I started to do that.
I only published my first novel at the age of 40. Till then, I wrote short stories.
Every time I write a song I feel really lucky and kind of surprised. Not surprised that I wrote it, but just surprised that things exist that you don’t know about.
This book that I just wrote is going to be coming out very soon to Australia.
Ronald Biggs
I tried, after I wrote ‘Twilight,’ to read ‘The Historian,’ because it was the big thing that summer. But I can’t read other people’s vampires. If it’s too close, I get upset; if it’s too far away, I get upset. It just makes me very neurotic.
Sir Walter, with his 61 years of life, although he never wrote a novel until he was over 40, had, fortunately for the world, a longer working career than most of his brethren.
I think probably the only thing that is around in these songs is that I was really lonely when I wrote a lot of them. But it was really by my own choosing because I was devoting myself to songwriting and dancing and I wasn’t really going out and seeing people.
I was always depressed growing up. There wasn’t a reason for it, I just was. I was sad and morose. I cried a lot, I wrote a lot, and I read a lot; and that was how I dealt with it.
Amanda Hocking
What I did was I completed the half-hour film, but before really showing it, I wrote two more sections for a potential feature film which I didn’t think would really happen, but at least I had it in case.
I grew up – my dad, every time I was with my dad, he was always – not always, but he wrote. He’s a writer. So he was always in his office writing. He made a plan and, like, a point of, ‘This is my work. I’m going to do this every day for these amount of hours.’ So I think that’s where I got, like, a work sort of ethic.
The U.S. basically wrote the rules and created the institutions of globalisation.
I seriously doubt I would ever have written the first story had I not been a lawyer. I never dreamed of being a writer. I wrote only after witnessing a trial.
I’d like just to be remembered as a guy that came along and did his music, did his best and showed up on time, clean and ready to do the job, wrote a few songs, and had a hell of a time.
Richard Wagner, a musician who wrote music which is better than it sounds.
So where a lot of people will spend three weeks on one song, I will write 10 in three weeks. Maybe the song that they sculpt is going to be as successful as just one of the 10 that I wrote.
While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.
We wrote ‘Stellify’ for Rihanna, but as we got to the end of writing it, I thought, ‘You know what? I’m gonna keep this for myself. We’ll give her another one.’ She’d have probably sung it better, but it is too good for me not to do it.
What's funny about Jesus' Son is that I never even wrot

What’s funny about Jesus’ Son is that I never even wrote that book, I just wrote it down. I would tell these stories and people would say, You should write these things down.
Denis Johnson
I wrote about wasting time, which I suppose is a part of the great human journey. We’re supposed to wallow, to go through the desert without water for a long time so that when we finally drink it, we’ll truly need it and we won’t spill a drop. It’s about being present.
Walton Goggins
I once had a crush on one of my teachers. I wrote him a love letter and stuck it in a bag in his office. I didn’t write my name on it, but I’m sure he figured out it was me.
I do not mind having written the song at all. I just wish that I had written it in a different key, as the high d is hard to play. I am glad that I wrote something that brought joy to millions of people.
Interpreter of Maladies is the title of one of the stories in the book. And the phrase itself was something I thought of before I even wrote that story.
We wrote what sounded good to us and hoped it would find a home.
Cynthia Weil
I don’t think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.
I wrote ‘Option B’ because I want other people to know it can get better, and I want to help people make it better.
I don’t write about certain arguments I have with my wife. I’d get my head torn off if wrote about certain things.
In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.
Shakespeare was a man who wrote poetry. I’m a man who writes poetry. Why not compare yourself to the best?
It was at this moment that I wrote my first important paper in theoretical physics. I was 32 years old, 5 years beyond the alleged age of senility for theorists.
Robert B. Laughlin
I had read everything Peter Drucker ever wrote.
I did go there later, but I hadn’t been there before I wrote the book. Sometimes I feel like the imagined can feel more real than the real?
I wrote what I felt I had to write, and I’m willing to put my own sanity and my reputation behind it.
Gloria Naylor
My poems – I don’t even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.
Sharon Olds
I did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay. It was probably harder for a regular director. He probably had to read the script the night before shooting started.
I wrote five issues of that and got the sack. Actually, they paid me for eight, but they changed their minds about the direction and threw three issues out the window.
Eddie Campbell
When I wrote the song, The Way It Is, I wanted to move people to take a stand on civil rights in this country.
Bruce Hornsby
I wrote on the fourth season of ‘Arrested Development.’
When you know your cast well and their strengths and weaknesses, you can start writing for them, just the way Shakespeare wrote for his actors.
For the novels I wrote before selling anything, I didn’t outline much. I had a vague idea of the story.
Stephen R. George
I wrote and produced millions and millions of selling records, so my publishing company alone was worth millions of dollars. I didn’t have to work anymore in life because when the rappers started sampling… I’m the most sampled artist in history.
Rick James
I think it’s silly for anyone to think you could write under the influence, but if they’d like to think that, I’d like to keep the legend alive. Maybe I was under the influence when I wrote Jesus’ Son and I just didn’t know it.
Denis Johnson
When I moved out to Los Angeles to get some film and television work, and couldn’t get any… I became a little isolated, a little terrified, and it’s a good place to get writing, because you’re so bored. So I wrote a few screenplays, and people notice those.
I spill it out as fast as I can. I don’t really edit. In Brazil, recently, I wrote 70 pages. In London, 80 pages.
‘The Way of the Gun’ I wrote in five days.
I always knew I wanted to be a musician, and I always knew I wanted to write, ’cause the people I was listening to all wrote. I never thought it was an option to sing anyone else’s songs.
Emeli Sande
You know, bad poetry I wrote in high school can still be found on the Internet, and, you know, there’s a Web log of our college newspaper. You know, there’s so many different stages of my creative development are sort of on-record if somebody were to choose to look for them.
In a previous life I wrote the software that controlled my physics experiments. That software had to deal with all kinds of possible failures in equipment. That is probably where I learned to rely on multiple safety nets inside and around my systems.
Wietse Venema
I started rapping at the age of 12. That’s when I wrote my first song, but I was more intrigued on learning how the recording process works: how do you create music and what materials I needed. So I educated myself musically so that I could focus on creating my own.
I've tried writing. Two days later I'd go visit it and

I’ve tried writing. Two days later I’d go visit it and say, Jesus Christ, who wrote this crap?
I was 18, at art school, and saw this cute boy playing banjo. I was obsessed. I taught myself how to play. I listened to a lot of country and just messed around. The second song I wrote on the banjo was ‘Good to Be a Man.’ That what’s got me signed.
I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson’s poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.
Gordon Getty
I’m a commercial writer, not an author. Margaret Mitchell was an author. She wrote one book.
Mickey Spillane
Gibson wrote ‘Neuromancer’ on a typewriter, you know, before the technology he was writing about existed.
I wrote each book in thirty-five days flat – just to get the darned thing finished.
Alistair Maclean
When I wrote ‘Marvin Gaye,’ my whole intention was to make a record that people would put on a record player… and just instantly make out with each other.
I don’t know why Sinclair Lewis fell in love with me. He didn’t get even the slightest response from me. But his letters were lovely. And the poems he wrote me were lovely. I used some of them in my book.
I suppose not everyone has a dad who wrote a book saying he didn’t believe in the Parliamentary road to socialism.
That first record, I wrote before I had a record deal.
Right at the end of the war I wrote a piano sonata, which was written at a time when Sam Barber used to come down here and we used to have lunch together in a very nice old hotel that’s now not there.
I wrote ‘Aadukalam’ keeping Dhanush in mind. As an actor, he delivers exactly what I need and sometimes more.
The first sequel thing I wrote was this ‘Forever Dawn‘ thing that will never get out, because it’s horrid. But it’s a really good outline for ‘Breaking Dawn’ – it’s very similar. I knew what I was doing, which is good, because I think if I hadn’t, there might have been a lot of pressure.
The first book I wrote was The Bride Price which was a romantic book, but my husband burnt the book when he saw it. I was the typical African woman, I’d done this privately, I wanted him to look at it, approve it and he said he wouldn’t read it.
Buchi Emecheta
I loved the last album, and it was one hundred percent me. But this is like me two years later, who understands a little bit more about music and understands a little bit more about making an album. I wrote a lot more.
I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.
And now it looks like I’m probably going to shoot a movie that I wrote. I got the money to do it, and I would star and all, because of being on Howard.
If you want to put out a song that you wrote yesterday, tomorrow go on Twitter, type in a new URL, and give it to the people!
Chrisette Michele
‘Pitchfork’ said something like, ‘Michael Imperioli wrote a book that sounds like Lou Reed fan fiction,’ which maybe it is. It’s fiction, and I’m a fan. But it’s not about me, and it’s not a Lou Reed book.
Once I had all the facts in, I found I didn’t have the immoral courage to pull the caper. So I wrote it as a story. As a teenager, I didn’t have any skills for writing as such, so it came out in 1500 words.
Remember that I wrote a pavane for a dead princess, and not a dead pavane for a princess!
Maurice Ravel
I had gone to New York with no plan at all. I did a lot of jobs – barman, teacher, security guard, postman and construction worker – and I was meeting many eccentric characters, and they were saying funny things, which I always wrote down.
You know when I really realized like ‘wow‘ what a gift this is was when I sang at camp and a girl wrote me a letter and said the song that I sung kept her from committing suicide.
Charles King
I wrote the book in my head when I was 6 years old.
He was the editor of our paper. He created the publishing house in Hebrew. He was – I wouldn’t say the ‘guru‘ – but really he was our teacher and a most respected man. I wrote for the paper of the youth movement.
I wanted to be a classical actress. I plodded along. I went to junior college in San Francisco, I was in a Repertory Company. My hero was Eva Le Gallienne, who was a great theater actress at the turn of the century who created her own company, and she wrote these hilarious autobiographies at the time.
When I wrote ‘Green, Green,’ it was like a really a statement of where I was at philosophically in my life.
A good story is a good story no matter who wrote it.
I really don’t feel that any of the pieces I wrote were confessions; there are no revelations about secrets in my life, and actually I have nothing to confess and I certainly do not ask for redemption and there is no reward for confessing that I expect.
Of the 60 movies I wrote, more than half were written in two weeks or less.
I have some fond memories – a couple of the nights on the town … a couple of songs I wrote when I was messed up that I’m sure wouldn’t have come out of me unless I was messed up. It’s kind of happy-sad about those days – I could do anything I wanted to. I did. And now I don’t want to do any of that.
My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is:

My sense of a poem – my notion of how you revise – is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.
Philip Levine
I’ve always kind of wrote when I wanted to. Once I get the idea in my head and get it outlined out, I usually just sit and write until it’s done.
Amanda Hocking
Twitter is so short, it’s safe. I don’t want my bosses to be like, ‘Hey, your script is due and we saw you wrote four blog pages.’
When I wrote the lyrics, melodies, and the first themes of ‘Serendipity,’ I tried to come up with some rare things you find in life, something very special, like the calico, three-striped cat; things that have extraordinary meanings in people’s lives.
I wrote a screenplay for a ‘Sweet Valley High’ adaptation, and it’s really amazing to me how many women who are my age have responded to the idea and are excited about the movie.
In 1966, I attended Marquette University and graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1970. I received my doctorate in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where I wrote my dissertation on William Faulkner‘s early novels.
Laurence Yep
Havana is one of the great cities of the world, sublimely tawdry yet stubbornly graceful, like tarnished chrome – a city, as a young Winston Churchill once wrote, where ‘anything might happen.’
When I was 13 or 14, I took seven months off from touring. I did a lot of weekend gigs in Louisiana. We have fairs and festivals every weekend. But I took seven months off. That’s when I really started digging deep. I wrote a couple songs that year that I still play every now and then for people.
I wrote the first book, Harvest of Stars, and as I was writing it, I saw that certain implications had barely been touched on… It’s perfectly obvious that two completely revolutionary things are going on, with cybernetics, and biological science.
Poul Anderson
The songs of Bizet are by a French peer of Rossini. When Rossini stopped composing, he was living in Paris. He also wrote some beautiful songs in French.
I wrote my first play when I was eight.
Pam Gems
For ‘King Cole’s American Salvage,’ I rode around in the wrecker with a local driver and watched him deal with customers and hook up the cars. I watched the guy who tore apart the cars in the junkyard. I also wrote poems about those guys. I loved hanging around the yard.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
We wrote verses that condemned us, with no hope of pardon, to the most bitter solitude.
I never wrote for children. I wrote with respect for the audience, which I’ve maintained all my life. Doesn’t mean I couldn’t be risque, but I did it smartly, without being vulgar.
Chespirito
Then you start another book and suddenly the galley proofs of the last one come in and you have to wrench your attention away from what you’re writing and try to remember what you were thinking when you wrote the previous one.
Bernard Cornwell
I wrote ‘The Painted Word,’ about modern art, and was denounced as reactionary. In fact, it is just a history, although a rather loaded one.
I wrapped my Christmas presents early this year, but I used the wrong paper. See, the paper I used said ‘Happy Birthday‘ on it. I didn’t want to waste it so I just wrote ‘Jesus’ on it.