A Quote by Michael Graves

I have architects write to me and ask me: How do you - and what do you do to - design the magic thing? I answer that very carefully. It's not necessarily about what you do, but the clients you do it for. You should write to Target, not me.
Occasionally people ask me how it is I write different types of things, and my answer to that is it's very natural. You get bored writing one kind of thing all the time.
I always run into these Ph.D.s. They write and write and write about sustainable development. Then these guys ask me, 'But, how do you do it?' They are scared to death to do anything.
I think, for me, there's The Book I Should Write and The Book I Wanted to Write - and they weren't the same book. The Book I Should Write should be realistic, since I studied English Lit. It should be cultural. It should reflect where I am today. The Book I Wanted to Write would probably include flying women, magic, and all of that.
Parents write to me, or come up to me after shows and ask me 'How can we get our children to be as excited as you obviously were as a child?' It's not necessarily what they want to hear when I say, 'Don't make them practise!'
Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.
People ask me: "Why do you write about food, and eating, and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way the others do?" . . . The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry.
Because my musical background is so diverse, it lends me to have very much my own style and it helps me to relate to the music as I'm going to play it. I just write. And if it comes out country, it's a country song. The funny thing is, I write all across the board. I just write what hits me at the time.
If they want to write about me in a good way, they should write how I do things that are useful.
There's always stuff to write about. So it's very gratifying on a lot of levels. This is stuff I got asked over and over again, or heard about. People would ask me about it, but they kind of knew the answer. It would be this ongoing question: "Your fans are wondering, now that you're married, are you still going to be able to write songs?" I'm serious! I would get asked that!
People write me letters and say I should answer them. But I don't like to answer letters. I don't write letters. I've never written my mother one.
I never learned to be a writer. I never took screenwriting courses. I never read anyone's scripts. As a writer, my only guiding principle has been to write about things that scare me, write about things that make me feel vulnerable, write about things that will expose my deepest fears, so that's how I write.
It's fun for me to try to write concise, compact things. It's a very good exercise for me. And I think it's important to try to do different things - change what I write about, and also the way I write. Otherwise, I'd just be repeating myself, which wouldn't be good for me or fair to my readers.
The idea that we should write towards the unknown aspects of our experience was totally groundbreaking for me. It gave me the license I needed to try to write outside myself. This attitude has deeply informed my approach to fiction, emboldening me to write characters with voices or situations that are vastly different from my own.
I'm a brown girl from a Punjabi pind raised in Toronto. I don't expect literary critics and purists to understand the nuances of my experiences, and the experiences of the people around me... And my tradition holds that there is a magic in the written word. So how I write, what I write of, and why I write all comes naturally.
The main thing you worry about is just coming up with songs at all. I don't sit down and write stuff like certain writers do. They think about what they are going to write first and then they write it. I just get what comes in at me. It's like I'm a musician and if I can keep my mitt on, I can catch the balls that come at me.
People always ask me, 'Why do you only write about heartbreak?' I think I only write when I'm broken, so that's just what happens. It makes me feel better, but having some distance helps.
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