Sometimes when I'm under pressure, if I think somebody is expecting stuff from me, I'll do better than if I was just left on my own. I can sit down - I'm a skilled writer, I've been doing it all my life - and I can get down to it.
I'm sort of a pressure writer. If somebody says, "Stan, write something," and I have to have it by tomorrow morning, I'll just sit down and I'll write it. It always seems to come to me. But I'm better doing a rushed job because if it isn't something that's due quickly, I won't work on it until it becomes almost an emergency and then I'll do it.
Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
I don't sit down to write a song; they just come to me from something that somebody says, or something in the news. The punchline comes to me, and I go over it in my head and get the song form. I hadn't been doing that a lot.
Sometimes the songs just come to me. I don't sit down to write like you'd sit down to make a pair of boots.
I've lived this lifestyle as an artist and sometimes we get caught up in the fun, women and partying. But when you really sit back and think about it, it's not what fulfills you deep down inside and there's much more to experience in life than just that.
I don't even subscribe to writer's block being a truthful thing. I've had writer's laziness quite often. But I think it's all about sitting down and facing down the blank page and doing it, and I've always been ok at that.
We must face the No. 1 critical issue of our day. It is youth crime in general and black-on-black crime in particular. There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved. After all we have been through, just to think we can't walk down our own streets, how humiliating.
You have to lay down in the center of the action lay down and wait until it charges then you must get up face it get it before it gets you the whole process is more shy than vulnerable so lay down and wait sometimes it's ten minutes sometimes it's years sometimes it never arrives but you can't rush it push it there's no way to cheat or get a jump on it you have to lay down lay down and wait like an animal .
At the end of the day, you just have to focus on winning. No one can take a win away from you. That's what I focused on. Life is not fair, so I don't go out there expecting it to be. I don't think any of us should go out expecting life to be fair. I think that's expecting too much, and I remind myself of that sometimes. You can get on with your life after that.
I always carry lots of stuff with me wherever I roam, always weighted down with books, with cassettes, with pens and paper, just in case I get the urge to sit down somewhere, and oh, I don't know, read something or write my masterpiece.
Imagine if somebody were to really sit down with Osama bin Ladin and say, 'Listen man, what is it that you're so angry at me about that you're willing to have people strap bombs to themselves, or get inside of airplanes and fly them into buildings?' That would be the miracle if we can get, sit down and talk to our enemies and find a way for them to hear us.
I think anyone who's not as good a writer as me is absolutely a hack, and I think anybody who's a slightly better writer than me is brilliant. So of course that makes me a horrible critic when it comes to books, because I can't distance my own experience from what I'm doing.
I think I sit down to the typewriter when it's time to sit down to the typewriter. That isn't to suggest that when I do finally sit down at the typewriter, and write out my plays with a speed that seems to horrify all my detractors and half of my well-wishers, that there's no work involved. It is hard work, and one is doing all the work oneself.
When somebody doesn't use common sense, I get frustrated. When I'm driving down the highway and someone is in the left-hand lane, and they're going very slow, sometimes I just go around them, and other times I'll be in the mood where I flash my lights and yell at them, like, 'What the heck are you doing? Get the heck out of my way!'
I want to sit down, and I want to laugh. Nothing works better for me than watching somebody slip on a banana peel.
Sometimes, you sit down to write a song, you don't realize what it's going to mean to somebody other than yourself.