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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
As for action movies, I did Tarzan, and I’m also about to shoot Meltdown, which John Carpenter 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.
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.
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.
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.
Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.
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.
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.
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.
I wanted to have a body of work behind me before I wrote about racism.
If you wrote a novel in South Africa which didn’t concern the central issues, it wouldn’t be worth publishing.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.’
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.
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 wrote my first book at 20, but my whole focus from about the age of 12 was to be a writer.
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.
My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature – science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.
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.
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.
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.
I wrote ‘Kshana Kshanam’ with the one and only purpose of impressing Sridevi. ‘Kshana Kshanam’ was my love letter to her.
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.
I came up with a story and I wrote it.
I had this vivid dream and woke up and I wrote the ‘MyPillow’ logo all over the house.
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.
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.
When I wrote the Anita Hill book I believed everything I wrote was accurate.
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.
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.
‘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.
From my anger, frustration, and hurt, I wrote the short story that would later become ‘The Hate U Give.’
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’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.
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.
Somebody wrote a script around us, but Dustin Abraham came with the best one.
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.
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.
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.
‘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.
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.
I was a 16-year-old girl at one point, so of course I wrote poetry.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
But mostly, I wrote songs and Viv wrote songs.
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 always sang standards because the songs I wrote for myself weren’t as easy to sing.
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.
I wrote my first piano piece when I was in 4th grade.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You made a lot of mistakes, and you wrote a lot of crap. But it was all part of the learning process.
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.
I don’t think my wife likes me very much, when I had a heart attack she wrote for an ambulance.
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.
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.
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.
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 the Nobel Prizes have grown from the wisdom of a practical chemist who wrote a remarkable will.
I sat down one night and wrote the line rock, rock, rock everybody.
When people know I wrote ‘Thelma and Louise,’ they don’t want to mess with me.
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.
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.
My grandmother passed at 104. She sang and wrote songs until she passed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.’
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.
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.
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.
‘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.
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.
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.
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!
The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.
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.
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.
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.
‘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.
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 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.
Capote wrote every day. He said that’s the only way, you have to sit down every day and do it.
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.
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.
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.
In some ways I think it would be very dignified if I went away for twenty years and then wrote my fourth book.
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.
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.
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.
‘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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.’
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.
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.
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.
Whites were the winners, blacks were the losers, we wrote the history books, and they didn’t feature.
I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I’ve never stopped writing since.
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!
I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.
And the irony is that they wrote better without access to my quotes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This book that I just wrote is going to be coming out very soon to Australia.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 wrote that book, I just wrote it down. I would tell these stories and people would say, You should write these things down.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When I wrote the song, The Way It Is, I wanted to move people to take a stand on civil rights in this country.
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.
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.
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.
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.
‘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.
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.
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’m a commercial writer, not an author. Margaret Mitchell was an author. She wrote one book.
I wrote each book in thirty-five days flat – just to get the darned thing finished.
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 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.
I wrote ‘Aadukalam’ keeping Dhanush in mind. As an actor, he delivers exactly what I need and sometimes more.
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.
‘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!
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.
I wrote the book in my head when I was 6 years old.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
