The importance is getting to something truthful and in that moment can only be in that moment. I don't like to use the word "improvise," but it's a continual writing of the film.
Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear.
So we have a choice to make. We can once again let Washington's bad habits stand in the way of progress. Or we can pull together and say that in America, our destiny isn't written for us but by us. We can place good ideas ahead of old ideological battles, and a sense of purpose above the same narrow partisanship. We can act boldly to turn crisis into opportunity and, together, write the next great chapter in our history and meet the test of our time.
Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I'll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, 'I'd like to write about that.' Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.
You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.
Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man's life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible.
Not getting bored of my own story and/or character is one of the main struggles I have had with novel writing, and I have put to bed big chunks of work that just didn't sustain my interest.
I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.
Except I'm aware that as a writer you can't get away with as much writing for children as you can with adults. Children have much more finely tuned senses of justice, morals, and ethics. They are much more Platonic: children are symmetrical, before we begin to fragment them with our own nonsensical ideas and squelch their natural joy in knowledge.
I tend to write songs fast, so the process usually only lasts around 30 minutes. In the studio is where I really can artistically breathe, and let my ideas flow.
For a writer you have to be interested in different cultures, different backgrounds. You are not there to write only about your village. You're there to show a bit of your village, but also to understand other villages.
There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas.
To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.