A Quote by Mick Jones
You don't have to always write about big stuff. Writing is about expressing yourself, you know? It can be about small stuff, too.
Related Quotes
I don't worry about being exposed. When I'm writing about myself I think about myself as a character. There is a ton of stuff going on in my life that I don't write about. If I need to write that stuff down, I write about myself in my diary.
I only write about stuff I know. I don't have a lot of experience with boys and stuff so I write a lot of songs about interesting and strange subjects that people wouldn't write songs about.
My writing is of a very different kind from anything I've heard about. All this mythological material is out there, a big gathering of stuff, and I have been reading it for some forty- or fifty-odd years. There are various ways of handling that. The most common is to put the material together and publish a scholarly book about it. But when I'm writing, I try to get a sense of an experiential relationship to the material. In fact, I can't write unless that happens ... I don't write unless the stuff is really working on me, and my selection of material depends on what works.
I wouldn't write about sh*t I don't know. You won't hear me write about politics in Africa and stuff, because I don't know enough about it. And I would never rap about something I can't back up.
I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy.
I believe that a lot of minority writers stress about whether they get pigeonholed in writing about identity stuff, like you can't write about other things.
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!
Another problem about writing about politics in the "age of globalization" is that so much of the violence in the form of war and also in the forms of institutional violence - sweatshops, child labor, victimization of people economically - happens elsewhere and out of sight. And when we do know about it and need to witness it, it's always mediated by images of one kind or another, so you're kind of stuck trying to write about what it's like trying to be you living your life thinking about and experiencing this stuff in that way.
You tend to write as you get older about family love more than you write about romantic love or ooh baby. ... The stuff that you want to celebrate about humanity has always been there and probably always will be.
I didn't really want to write about music very much in 'High Fidelity.' I wanted to write about the relationship stuff, and the music stuff is kind of a bit of fun on top and something to frame it with.
I have grown in my writing and I care about it now and I know how important it is to write stuff.
'What It Is' was based on this class I've been teaching for 10 years - I wanted to write a book about writing that didn't mention stuff like story structure, protagonists, and all those things that we know about only because they already exist in stories.
There's always someone out there telling you your nose is too big or too small, or you're too fat or too thin, or they don't like your hair. In life, there's always going to be someone who doesn't like something about you, so you have to focus on what makes you happy about yourself. You're the only person you need to please.
What makes me laugh is hearing the stuff about my son or the stuff about my mom. I was a big fan of Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy; they talked a lot about their moms and their kids. Those are the things that inspired me to do stand-up.
The way to write really good songs is to write about the things that happen in your life and where you are in the moment, and writing about stuff that happens in your 30s is not the sexiest song subject.
I also have just my own limits about stuff. I'm not interested in writing graphically about sexual assault for example. I feel like the stuff that I'm fascinated by is the stuff that's part of the public imagination of what horror is. The bleakness is a different issue. I think that just stems from my personality. I wish that I offered a little more glimmer of hope sometimes.
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