All of my writing has guitars behind it, even the novels.
I was addicted to hacking, more for the intellectual challenge, the curiosity, the seduction of adventure; not for stealing, or causing damage or writing computer viruses.
Most of 'All Hail West Texas' was written during orientation at a new job I had. I had basically worked this job before, I knew this stuff, so I was writing lyrics in the margins of all the Xeroxed material.
For me, writing for younger audiences and writing for adults uses two different halves of my brain.
As a performing group, the Beatles began by playing old rock favorites, for dancing, to tough audiences in Liverpool and Hamburg. When they began writing seriously, they discovered that they couldn't compose in the early American rock tradition.
'Hamilton' is revolutionary in terms of writing.
When I first read the scenes I got to audition, I just could tell there was obviously something there. The writing speaks for itself, but also it's just the fact that 'The Handmaid's Tale' is such an amazing story. I had never read the book before I auditioned.
I like the process of pencil and paper as opposed to a machine. I think the writing is better when it's done in handwriting.
I just hate sitting and writing - I had to do that in school. Plus, I have terrible handwriting.
In writing a little tragedy, 'The Gaol Gate,' I made the scenario in three lines, 'He is an informer; he is dead; he is hanged.' I wrote that play very quickly.
Over the years, I've come to realize that writing 'I Ain't Living Long Like This' was an exercise in combined musical influence, mostly that of Hank Williams, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan - artists no one has ever heard of.
I think I have a harder time writing about things that I am not actually going through.
I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.
It was no hardship to me to spend long hours reading and writing.
I so find Harold Pinter and David Mamet's writing to be exciting, and obviously there aren't that many female - at least with Mamet, there aren't that many good female roles. But I always thought it would be interesting to play one of the guy roles.
I will carry on writing, to be sure. But I don't know if I would want to publish again after Harry Potter.
My writing is jagged and harsh, I want it to remain that way; I don't want it smoothed out.
When writing on black life, whites have often been unwelcome, usually called upon to give witness or hauled in as the accused.
I don't want them to read what I'm writing and say, 'I think that's right,' and agree with me. I want them to read something and then walk away and be haunted by it.
When you're writing stuff that's already clotted with neologisms and trying to get across fairly abstruse concepts, you're already putting a heavy burden on the reader.
