It is a miserable thing to have people writing about your private life while you are alive. I have tried to stop it all that I could but there have been many abuses by people I trusted. You cannot stop trusting people in life but I have learned to be a little bit careful. The way to make people trust-worthy is to trust them.
When I came of age I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher to the Rule of Three.... The little advanceI now have upon this store of education, I have picked up from time to time under the pressure of necessity.
There is no better feeling than when you write something you know is a piece of you and that, at some point, is going to communicate with someone else.
There is no learned man but will confess be hath much profited by reading controversies,--his senses awakened, his judgment sharpened, and the truth which he holds firmly established. If then it be profitable for him to read, why should it not at least be tolerable and free for his adversary to write? In logic they teach that contraries laid together, more evidently appear; it follows then, that all controversy being permitted, falsehood will appear more false, and truth the more true; which must needs conduce much to the general confirmation of an implicit truth.
To write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers pay within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for.
I remember my emotions the day we watched Nelson Mandela walk out of prison Writing & literature in South Africa during the anti-apartheid years, became a 'cultural weapon.' You had to use it to fight apartheid & some of us resisted that in the end, you recognize that you are facing a government that has no scruples about using culture & art to oppress you.
Film writing and concert writing are two very different things. In film writing I am serving the film and it tells you what to write. I have to stay within the parameters of the film. In writing concert music for the stage I can write anything I want and in this day and modern age rules can be broken.