Being nice to everybody, saying hello to everyone in the room, signing every autograph; it was instilled in me at a very young age that this was what I was suppose to do. But I don't think it helps at all. I see more people who are rude or arrogant being rewarded - but, this way, I can put my head on the pillow at night.
I don't have a writer's room. I write all the shows myself. Ninety-one episodes a season, I'm sitting there at the computer writing and writing and writing because I want the voice to be authentic so that the audience is hearing from me and not other writers.
Prowling about the rooms, sitting down, getting up, stirring the fire, looking out the window, teasing my hair, sitting down to write, writing nothing, writing something and tearing it up...
I began running on an everyday basis after I became a writer. As being a writer requires sitting at a desk for hours a day, without getting some exercise you'd quickly get out of shape and gain weight, I figured.
I posted some story about the Arizona State baseball coach getting into a fight with an autograph hound, and it was a disastrous thing. The guy rescinded his story. It proved to me that I'm not cut out to be a proper journalist. I'm much better sitting around and making fun of journalists and telling them what terrible journalists they are than being an actual journalist.
Being a writer involves writing. You've got to commit to sitting down and writing instead of Xbox or Netflix.
I remember being a little kid sitting in the living room with my brother and some friends from around the neighborhood, and I would sit at the piano and as they were running around the room doing different things and being silly, acting out, I would actually play the score for it - the music that went along with it.
I'm into lately being a little less precious about writing and being like, "Okay, what if I just locked myself in my room, pretend that there's someone outside with a gun that's saying, 'Don't come out until you write something.'"
I wanted to be the writer in the room setting depth charges of feeling out the world with my language.You know, I had a very romantic idea about that.But I grew into being a performer.
If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.
I was very happy sitting alone at a dining room table, writing a script.
I was able to notice in a very early stage, there were discrepancies between the people who are writing the songs and discrepancies about the self that I was writing about. I was feeling that there were all these different people, both writing the record and having the record being written about them, even though ostensibly it was me sitting down and documenting a series of life experiences. Part of that, when I recognized this unconscious thing I was doing, was about these spaces, about these gaps.
Sometimes I feel like I'm taking on a role when I'm writing a song, and it doesn't always have to be true. I'm not sitting in my room crying with my guitar, writing a slow solo about a depressing breakup; that's not me.
The difference between writing where you know where to draw the line and writing where you're being way too mean is whether you can tell that the writer is not talking to family or friends anymore. Generally, if you say something bad about somebody on stage, you need to say two bad things about yourself. A lot of times, I think I'm the worst person in the room.
I haven't found a drug yet that can get you anywhere near as high as a sitting at a desk writing, trying to imagine a story no matter how bizarre it is, [or] going out and getting into the weirdness of reality and doing a little time on the Proud Highway.
When I was writing my first novel, I smoked cigarettes. And when I think about what it was like to smoke, I remember exactly the feeling of sitting in front of my big old computer in that little room where I wrote my first novel.