The effect of prizes on one's career - if that is what to call it - is considerable, since they give one more clout with publishers and more notoriety among journalists. The effect on one's writing, however, is nil - otherwise, one would be in deep trouble.
I've been writing since I was about thirteen but didn't start a book until 2007. I spent four years writing a sci-fi novel before I wrote 'The Bone Season' at nineteen.
The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.
I guess when I first started writing music, I really had no idea if anyone was ever going to hear what I was writing and almost no intention of people hearing it. So, it was kind of this journal. It was pretty unfiltered.
The possibilities are infinite with new writing; every time you open a new script, there's no limit to what it might contain.
I'll be writing songs till I die. There's just no question.
When you're writing with an artist or for an artist, you have to help them serve their vision. That's the cool part about writing songs. There are no rules.
It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
Writing for the theater, you find yourself living a nocturnal life.
I'd probably be a super wealthy guy if I had sat around writing songs and getting them placed like everyone else I know. But I write songs about people or after I meet them and they're somewhat biographical - they're fiction but also non-fiction.
Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?
It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.
I started writing 'Normal People' not knowing that anyone would read it, not knowing that anyone would read the first book, so I didn't really have any hang ups about, 'Oh, I can't do this again. I've done this already.' It was just a project I was working on for my own amusement.
I dropped out of my Ph.D. philosophy program at Northwestern in the summer of 2015, in my mid-20s. I kind of had the idea of writing fiction, and so I was working on that for a year but without ever having very much success at it.
Most of us don't have to worry about being shot if we poke our noses outside. So we are comfortable, but the people I'm writing about are definitely not comfortable, and being shot while they're still inside is a good possibility.
The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.
I've been writing in notebooks for 40 years or so.
Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence.
If I really considered myself a writer, I wouldn't be writing screenplays. I'd be writing novels.
I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.
