I always tell my students to write the story all the way through, not to play with the language and fall in love with sentences that you then have to….

I guess the approach to song writing for me so far has been to use more chords and less math..

Good writers hate bad writing but hating bad writing doesn’t make you good. Writing badly does..

It actually took me 20 years to want to write about my youth. I was definitely always a little intimidated about writing about that part of my life..

... what I fear in writing is the safe decision..

When the writing is good and it suits your character, you don't have to memorize anything, because it just makes sense. You read it and you go, "Oh, ….

When I went to the University of Iowa in order to be a writer, I thought, This is the worst way to learn how to write. To sit in a room with a bunch ….

I would sooner be robbed by a fan than a company. The fan may be broke and have but one choice. There is no excuse for the way the "songwriter" is ro….

As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Jap….

It's about being in a race with time - just having a strong sense of mortality, and the idea of, How much time do you have left? How do you want to s….

I prefer nothing, unless it is true..

It would be an egregious mistake to ever refer to me in the same breath as most of the people I write about..

Exercise II. Write a diary, imagining that you are trying to make an old person jealous. I have written an example to get you started: Dear Diary, I ….

It remained an open question, how much sympathy love could stand..

Everything is expressed through RELATIONSHIPS..

The worst advice a young writer can get is "Write what you know." Imagination is more important than experience..

You'd never killed anyone. Then you had..

I'm too shy for personal appearances, and I've found out that anytime I talk about my writing, I can't do any writing for many weeks afterward..

I'm thinking of writing a book on national health care. It will be 2,000 pages, and you'll have two hours to read it..

Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about….

Memoirs give the knowledge about the author and his environment. They are different from biography. Memoirs do not get ahead, and the man who writes ….