I write and write and write, and then I edit it down to the parts that I think are amusing, or that help the storyline, or I'll write a notebook full of ideas of anecdotes or story points, and then I'll try and arrange them in a way that they would tell a semi-cohesive story.
Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
The frankest and freest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter; the writer gets his limitless freedom of statement and expression from his sense that no stranger is going to see what he is writing.
Writing the record for me - every record is almost a surprise. When people ask me, what are the themes you want to grapple with on this one? I have no idea until the record's finished.
Culture is everything. Culture is the way we dress, the way we carry our heads, the way we walk, the way we tie our ties - it is not only the fact of writing books or building houses.
I don't consider myself an artist necessarily, but craftsmen or people in the arts, their spiritualism is sort of when you're writing well or performing well or doing whatever you do well, there's an element of that that's either God-given, a talent that you're not necessarily responsible for.
We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent wasa youthful effervescence which we have now lost.
He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public. That statement only is fit to be made public, which you have come at in attempting to satisfy your own curiosity.
One day I'm going to write a book about osprey. It has really gotten deep into my bloodstream. So when you ask what else I do, I feel like this is part of what I do....is to watch these birds.
I read a lot. I spend of lot time thinking. It actually looks like I'm doing nothing, but... hanging out with clever and interesting people is a must if you're writing comedy, like hanging out with a good bass player when you're a drummer.
The good diarist writes either for himself alone or for a posterity so distant that it can safely hear every secret and justly weigh every motive. For such an audience there is need neither of affectation nor of restraint. Sincerity is what they ask, detail, and volume; skill with the pen comes in conveniently, but brilliance is not necessary; genius is a hindrance even; and should you know your business and do it manfully, posterity will let you off mixing with great men, reporting famous affairs, or having lain with the first ladies in the land.
Nothing so fretful, so despicable as a Scribbler, see what I am, and what a parcel of Scoundrels I have brought about my ears, and what language I have been obliged to treat them with to deal with them in their own way; - all this comes of Authorship.