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If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
Critics are people who sit on the mountaintop and look down on the battlefield. When the fighting is finished, they take it upon themselves to come down from the mountain and shoot the survivors.
I have a structured songwriting process. I start with the music and try to come up with musical ideas, then the melody, then the hook, and the lyrics come last.
In Hollywood, the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.
Reading and weeping opens the door to one’s heart, but writing and weeping opens the window to one’s soul.
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
If you haven’t got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you’ll only have to throw away the first three pages.
Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.
A true author, no matter the medium, is an artist with godlike knowledge of his subject, and the proof of his authorship is that his pages smack of authority.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.
Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.
Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.
I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.
I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.
It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil, trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out of it.

























