Write Quotes

I've been taking longer to write stories lately.

You don't sit up in a cave and write the Great American Novel and know it is utterly superb, and then throw it page by page into the fire. You just don't do that. You send it out. You have to send it out.

A lot of the songs I've recorded are songs I write.

I just can't seem to write songs about peace and love. Yeah right, how do you get that?

I really had little interest in becoming famous. When I write my book, it will be my guide to avoid becoming a rock star.

I grew up in an environment of jokes and sarcasm and puns. I talk that way, so I write that way.

I write music all the time. When I talk about having writer's block, it's more to do with lyrics than anything else.

I'm much faster now. When you only have a certain amount of time to write, after a while you learn to use your time well or you stop writing.

There's a practical problem about time and energy, and a more subtle problem of what it does to a writer's head, to continually analyze why they write, where it all comes from, where it's going to.

I'm getting ready to write a piece now, and it's been six months thinking about it, changing the instrumentation, changing the name, doing more reading.

If you write chick lit, and if you're a New Yorker, and if your book becomes the topic of pop-culture fascination, the paper might make dismissive and ignorant mention of your book. If you write romance, forget about it. You'll be lucky if they spell your name right on the bestseller list.

In addition I wanted to write a Southern novel, because I'm a Southerner.

It used to be that you had to make female TV characters perfect so no one would be offended by your 'portrayal' of women. Even when I started out on 'The Office' eight years ago, we could write our male characters funny and flawed, but not the women. And now, thankfully, it's completely different.

It's one thing you aspire to: someday, you'll be able to write a book.

There's a personal story of my own that I will write at some point, and it's a film that I will happily make. It could very well be the next thing I do, unless someone shows me something great.

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.

I don't write books inadvertently.

It was kind of easier for me to do records that didn't take a year or two years of my life to write and to make.

I did what most writers do when something happens that's overwhelming, fascinating, moving, all of that. I didn't know what else to do about it except write about it.

We don't sit down and go, 'People are uneasy about the economy. Let's write about that.'

I wouldn't totally rule out doing Letterman or the Tonight Show if I had a set that I just happened to write that I thought was funny but was still appropriate for network censors. But I'm not going to go out of my way.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

We'd have made more, but I kept forgetting to write songs down.

I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.

Frontiersmen good and bad, gunmen as well as inspired prophets of the future, have been my camp companions. Thus, I know the country of which I am about to write as few men now living have known it.

I did write a letter to the archdiocese who'd banned the song, Only the Good Die Young, asking them to ban my next record.

I write synopses after the book is completed. I can't write it beforehand, because I don't know what the book's about. I invent something for my publisher because he asks for one, but the final book ends up very differently.

Whatever you have a passion for, then you must do. If you want to write, write about something you know about.

If you don't like my book, write your own. If you don't think you can write a novel, that ought to tell you something. If you think you can, do. No excuses. If you still don't like my novels, find a book you do like.

Whatever you do, make sure you want to write more than you want to be a writer. Make sure you want to act more than you want to be an actor. That is what will sustain you.