Wrote Quotations | Page 2

As I wrote I began to see more strongly that there were inescapable analogies. You couldn't really live through the '80s without feeling how crass and distasteful some of the economic doctrines were. The slave trade is a perfect model for that kind of total devotion to the profit motive without reckoning the human consequences.

'Unbreakable Smile' was based off one of the songs I wrote for the album - it was actually the first song I wrote for the album without realizing it yet. I think I wanted to name the album that because it seemed like that was just the theme of that chapter in my life and just the theme of all the songs put together.

When I was 13, I started writing songs, and it fell into my lap all of a sudden. I wrote poems and journals, but that's when it switched for me to songwriting. That's when I wanted to do everything. It was like a fire all of a sudden. I started coming to Nashville and moved here when I was 15.

I don't know if a novelist ever fully detaches him- or herself from what they wrote and the way they wrote it. I can watch 'Presumed Innocent' again and again, and I will always be bothered by the same things that will never bother anybody else.

I've always been one of those people that, if I am angry, I just hold it in. And I always kind of, like, wrote it in a song and put it aside for myself because it helps me get it out. It's almost like exercising; it's almost like that for me.

I got it into my head that I was going to be starring in movies that I wrote, so that's what I did. I stopped acting in all things, and I wrote my first script, which was optioned a week after I finished it.

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.

For novelists, the imagination is everything. The trick is to guide one's imagination using research. I love using old maps. When I wrote my novels on London and New York, I found wonderful historical atlases. Paris has the most lavish maps of all.

'The Things They Carried' is labeled right inside the book as a work of fiction, but I did set out when I wrote the book to make it feel real... I use my own name, and I dedicated the book to characters in the book to give it the form of a war memoir.

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 still have a lot of the stories I wrote in high school. Hand wrote... a number of them are in purple ink, rendering them illegible, a fact we should probably be forever thankful for.

My first published novel, 'American Rust,' took three and a half years of full-time work to write. But I wrote two apprentice novels before that.

Each time I write a new piece, whether a novel, a picture book, a speech or anything, really, it has so much to do with what I'm going through personally or a problem I'm trying to work out. When I wrote my novel 'Baby,' my three children had all just gone out the door.

For a writer, New York works well. Literary work is very elitist. I worked two hours a day, maximum, and the time after that was very agreeable. I walked a lot with pleasure. Those two hours augmented the day. I wrote more here than in Paris, an entire chapter of a new novel.

Sometimes a line enters your head, and you're so grateful for it. You go online to check to see if anyone wrote it before you. You must have stolen it.

I love the idea of the 'vignette,' which is associated with the decorative, illustrative, small, and thus with the feminine, and thus easily maligned. I mean, Emily Dickinson wrote vignettes, right?

My husband wrote the story for my first book, but then he didn't want to do that anymore. So if I was going to go on being an illustrator, I had to start writing the stories, too.

I wrote 'Airborn' after completing three books about bats. I loved my bats, but what a treat it was to write about humans again. They could eat food other than midges and mosquitoes, they wore clothing, they slept in beds - all this struck me as wonderfully novel.

I could not bear to think that I wrote a five-hundred page novel just because I needed to love my father.

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.

The poem 'What Teachers Make' is not without its detractors. This one person wrote to me and said: 'Gee, Mr. Mali. You don't possibly have a teacher-God complex, do you?' And that was the first time I'd ever heard of that expression. So, yeah, I'm sure I have a teacher-God complex.

Nathaniel Rich wrote 'Odds Against Tomorrow' well before Hurricane Sandy and its surge crashed onto the isle of Manhattan, well before the streets were flooded and the subways drowned, only the Goldman Sachs building sparkling above the darkened avenues.

It feels so satisfying to hear a song I wrote come out of the radio.

Many times, people have come up to me after singing some songs, and they'd say, 'Richie, do you know what you did?' And I'd say, 'What?' And they'd go, 'I wrote these songs down for you to sing, and you sang them all in a row.' But that's the kind of communication that happens, you know.

My foray into young adult lit was by no means planned. I wrote the first 'Alfred Kropp' book as an adult novel, which everyone loved but no one would publish - until I changed my protagonist from a thirty-something P.I. into a 15-year-old kid. After that, it was off to the races, and I am so glad.

My wife noticed that I wrote really good complaint letters about faulty products and that I could get anything I wanted out of these big corporations, and she said that I was a good writer and that I should go to my dad and ask him for help.

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.

When I became the manager of the New York Yankees, it was an opportunity to realize my lifelong dream of winning the World Series. We were fortunate enough to succeed in our first season in 1996, and in the years that followed, we wrote some great new chapters in Yankee history.

I grew up in a working-class Catholic family in south Louisiana. I went to a state university. I taught literature, wrote a novel that was the novel I wanted to write, and got a couple of good reviews but no real traction. I had no idea how to get a job in TV.

I pretty much always knew I wanted to be a writer. I was writing goofy stories when I was 7 or 8. That was what I call 'wishful-thinking writing.' I grew up in the city and always wanted a horse, but there was no way I was getting a horse. So I wrote all these stories about kids who had horses. It's still fun entering these other worlds.

My first songs were about animals and shoes. I wrote one song about PF Flyers, and one to my fish.

I always worried that the creative well would dry up. I was sure that if I wrote a book a year, I would eventually run out of ideas. Actually, the opposite has been true for me. The more I write, the more ideas come to me and it gets easier.

I mostly wrote 'Thursday's Child' to explore the idea of a wild child - a creature who lived much as humans used to live, when our needs were simple and our worlds were small.

For a writer, personal freedom is not so important. It is not individual freedom that guarantees the greatness of literature; otherwise, writers in democratic countries would be superior to all others. Some of the greatest writers wrote under dictatorship - Shakespeare, Cervantes.

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.

I devour history books. I love anything by Thomas B. Costain or George MacDonald Fraser. He writes magnificent history, and he also wrote the Flashman stories, which are irresistible.

I wrote 'Mr. In-Between' very quickly when I was about 23. I wrote the penultimate chapter, then realised I'd done something which was written to the best of my abilities. I panicked. I hesitated to finish the final chapter and went into withdrawal for three years. I decided to pick it up again after I went drinking with author Tim Binding.

Maud Gonne was - excuse me, Maud Gonne was central to the Gaelic literature revival. She wrote plays, and she sang.

My mother painted and wrote. She always had a painting in progress on an easel in the kitchen, so our house always smelled like oil paint. At night, she wrote after she'd put my sisters and me to bed, and the sound of her typing was our lullaby.

My father's father wrote for a Philadelphia newspaper and aspired to be a playwright. We had in our house a couple of crazy unproduced plays that he had written. For the one creative writing class I took in my life, I didn't do any writing - I decided that I would plagiarize his terrible play to not fail the class.

You can find dozens of books about people taking the Trans-Siberian Railroad. I knew I had to do something different to cross Siberia. To drive and to talk with people along the way, that was how I wrote my book 'Great Plains'. I drove and camped in Siberia, but did not have a real program.

I was separated from my wife at the time. A lot of people think I wrote it about prison.

I wrote one book, signed with a good agent, and sat back and waited for the phone to ring. I was sure that the great news would come at any moment. Four books later, I finally got that call.

I've wanted to write ever since I've gotten into comics. I wrote little things for myself when I was doing mini-comics and things, before becoming a professional. But I just figure at some point or another, I've got to make the leap. I just have to do it.

'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.

Around 1967 Dan Bobrow wrote a program to do algebra problems based on symbols rather than numbers.

As always, I wrote songs. Some people cook or play sports. This is what I love to do. Sometimes I can't express myself that well in talk, so I write songs.

I wrote as a kid, but I never wanted to be a writer, particularly. I had been drawing and painting for years and loved that.

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.

I wrote poetry off and on in high school, when I could manage to get out of gym classes and sports - using my allergies as an excuse - and climb the hill behind school till I found a nice place to settle down with a notebook and look at Spokane spread out below.

Oh, yes, we were on location with Another Man's Poison, which I wrote for Bette Davis.

I didn't have the money to put myself through drama school, so I thought - naively - that if I wrote a play and put it on at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, agents would see me and that would be my ticket to Hollywood. I wrote a musical; an acting coach saw it and put me on his course for free while I wrote for his company.

I was incredibly determined - I wrote short stories, I wrote the beginnings of novels. I wrote a little children's book and sent it to the editor-in-chief of the children's division of Simon and Schuster and she asked me to write a little children's book for a series she was doing.

The poems were the only thing I wrote that was not for everyone else. Then my editors at Penguin, who were also friends and had seen several of them, aggressively urged me to do a book. Editors can be aggressive, especially after drinks. That's how 'Beyond This Dark House' appeared.

This book that I just wrote is going to be coming out very soon to Australia.

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.

One of my favorite songs is 'Ghost' by Indigo Girls. Emily Saliers wrote that, and she is one of the most talented songwriters ever.

'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.

Homer was able to give us no information relating to the truth, for he wrote of human rather than divine things.

The first piece of 'long' fiction I wrote was a novella parody of Stephen King's 'Christine.' I was in high school, and my version was about a kid with a possessed locker instead of a possessed car. It was also my first attempt at humour, which fell completely flat because no one who read it realized it was a parody!

It doesn't really feel like it's got anything to do with me. I mean, I know I wrote it, and all that and invented the characters and made it up, but it's Mike's film, so doing the press and stuff, it feels a little bit inauthentic. I was just one component of it.

I wrote 'Ain't It Cool? Hollywood's Redheaded Stepchild Speaks Out,' because in doing hundreds and hundreds of interviews over the past six and a half years, I was tired of the story being half told or a third told or erroneously told.

When I was in my late twenties, a friend suggested that, since I was an avid SF reader and had been since I was barely a teenager, that since it didn't look like the poetry was going where I wanted, I might try writing a science fiction story. I did, and the first story I ever wrote was 'The Great American Economy.'

I started my career as a liberal arts major from Berkeley, wrote about enterprise IT for a few years, then followed my passion for the digital narrative into graduate school as well (also at Berkeley, the Oxford of the West or, perhaps, the Harvard - sorry Stanford!). My first project out of grad school was 'Wired' magazine.

The MFA program did one great thing for me: It taught me how to be a better reader and critic. Nothing I wrote during my time at Columbia remains - but learning how to really deconstruct a work of fiction - that, of course, is a permanent part of me now.

When I wrote about the French Revolution, I didn't choose to write about aristocrats; I chose characters who began their lives in provincial obscurity.

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.

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.

My mother wrote poetry when I was young - I have an early memory of the sound of her typewriter - and my father told me inventive bedtime stories.

I get tips from Bob Gaudio. And one of my songs somehow caught the attention of one of my idols, Marty Panzer, who wrote big hits for Barry Manilow. So two guys who inspired me to write lyrics are now teaching me to write.

Back when the concept of organ transplants qualified as science fiction, novelist Maurice Renard wrote a thriller called 'Les Mains d'Orlac.' Call it a bastard offspring of 'Frankenstein;' its plot revolved around the old theme of Science Giving Us Stuff We Shouldn't Have - in this particular case, restoring severed body parts.

When I realized that people actually wrote comics, that it was a job people could do, I thought, 'Gee, these things are only 17 pages long! I could probably finish one of those and find out whether I suck before I've spent five years of my life on it.' In stumbling into comics that way, I discovered that I loved the form.

The Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes wrote that beauty is fundamental. Well, with the poet's permission, so is courage.

I directed the next-to-last episode of 'Parenthood.' I wrote three of the four last episodes. I had the cast to my house. Had a champagne toast with the writers. Had a huge cast and crew party. Drank eggnog in the camera truck after we wrapped the final day. All that, and I don't really feel like I've said good-bye to 'Parenthood.'

It was an easy decision for me which books to self-publish as ebooks. I got the rights back to two Avon books that I wrote at the start of my career. I paid to have these two books, 'Bold Conquest' and 'Wild Hearts,' scanned. When I got them back as documents, I had to clean them up and correct all the typos, etc.

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.

I've been writing for as long as I can remember, and reading even before that. My mom still has stories that I wrote when I was in kindergarten. I was a reader and a re-reader. That's the main reason I became a writer.

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.

It was a good 15 or 20 years before anyone at Rand would be in the same room with me. They didn't want the question raised, 'What's your relationship with Daniel Ellsberg?' And not one of them wrote me a letter because they didn't want a letter of theirs to show up in my trash - which the FBI had been going through.

When I first began to have the initial idea for 'Heartsease,' I just wrote a skeleton story; that is, I started her off as this young, bright 16-year-old and then added the events that occurred and where she and other characters fitted in, even writing 3 different endings, as I was not sure where Mary's story would lead to.

Well just meeting J. K. Rowling was amazing because she created all this world. And all the fans, we all get so obsessed with it and then you met the one person who made it all up. It was just so amazing. And I was just so amazed that that she wrote this book and all of the films have happened.

I wrote a techno song after I was deported. I was in America for a little bit, but then I was deported back to Germany. I was very sad.

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.

I started writing because it was hard to find acting jobs. I didn't like any monologues in auditions, so I started to write my own things. Since then, I have written a couple of shows. I was nominated for playwright of the year for a play I wrote called 'Potential Space.'

I'm a mother of a three-year-old, but when I started 'California,' my son wasn't even a twinkle in my eye. Because the book took as long as it did, I wrote it before I was pregnant, while I was pregnant, and as a new mother - so I enjoyed a diversity of experiences while creating this world.

In ten episodes, we were able to do our writers' room first. We did that all summer and wrote for 15 weeks and got everything in really good shape.

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.

I wrote my first full book when I was fourteen, and that was 'Obernewtyn.' It was also the first book I had published. It was accepted by the first publisher I sent it to, and it was short listed for Children's Book of the Year in the older readers category in Australia.

I just fell in love with his music. I thought Yanni was Japanese. I didn't have any idea what a Yanni was. I just thought I was in love with a Japanese man who wrote beautiful music.

Seriously, I dreamed that I was in my husband's dream, watching what he was dreaming about. Like, I was in his dream as an onlooker. It was so weird that I immediately wrote it down in the middle of the night. In the morning, it still sounded cool.

I was a good student, but a speech impediment was causing problems. One of my teachers decided that I couldn't pronounce certain words at all. She thought that if I wrote something, I would use words I could pronounce. I began writing little poems. I began to write short stories, too.

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.

And one of the reasons that I wrote the cook books was so that I could be at home more than being on the road.

The two favorite episodes of 'Lost' that Adam and I wrote were 'Dave,' which was where Hurley has an imaginary friend, and 'Trisha Tanaka is Dead,' where Hurley finds a van and starts it.

Well, I always wanted to write from the time I was very little, and my mother encouraged me. She wrote a journal from the time she was 15 up until about the age of 76.

To achieve the very pinnacle of good taste, the neoclassicists wrote their plays entirely in alexandrine verse, a rarefied meter that is uniquely tailored to the French language and fits no other.

I've been in grocery stores, and if they're playing my music, I'll yell, 'Hey! I wrote that!' I've been next to cars and have done that!

Complex astronomical instruments like the Antikythera Mechanism and the Nebra Sky Disk were made by Pagans. Our Pagan intellectual heritage includes poets and scientists and literary intellectuals of every kind, especially including those who wrote some of the most important and influential books in all of Western history.

Becoming a YA author was actually a very lucky accident. When I wrote the 'Queen of Everything,' I thought it was a book for adults.

There's the Bacon society, which is fostered by his fourth wife Helen Bacon, but I don't know what kind of performances his music gets. He wrote symphonic music and some chorale music.