A Quote by Norman MacCaig
All I write about is what's happened to me and to people I know, and the better I know them, the more likely they are to be written about.
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People always say, 'Do you get bothered by what people say or blog or write about you?' I only do if I know them. If I know them, and I have a relationship with them and they write that, then that would surprise me a lot. Usually the people writing the negative stuff don't know me at all.
To be honest, I’m more concerned with living my life than writing about my life. I feel like that’s really the main thing I know now that I didn’t know when I was younger — and that is that you have to have a life to write about one. If you’re more worried about having experiences so you can write about them, I think you’re kinda being ridiculous, and I think a lot of young people look at it like that.
My students know I have a life, they know I've written about my life. They know some detail, probably more than they know about their physics teacher, but I would've told them anyway!
The best thing to do is to write about what you know, and if you write about what you know you can always pull those nice little tidbits that hook people, that shows that you know about this world and can bring people into a world that they may not know nothing about.
I've never written a fiction before about real people. . . . I read everything that I could find by people who met them and tried to get some impression of them, but as always when you write fiction, even if you have completely fictitious characters, you start by thinking of what is plausible, what would they say, what would they be likely to do, what would they be likely to think. At some point, if it is every going to come to life, the characters seem to take over and start speaking themselves, and it happened with [COPENHAGEN].
For better or worse, a lot of people's images are based on the first things that are written about them. You can't control what people write about you, so - good or bad - I have never lost sleep about it.
People feel like they know you when you're in their living room, weekly, for five years. But I always get uncomfortable when people know more about me than I know about them.
My feeling is that, and I've been writing about my family over the years, although it might make them feel uncomfortable, people generally like to be written about. If I've written a song about the family, they enjoy being mentioned in the songs. Nobody's confronted me and said 'don't write any songs about me.
...when I came back, I found Mom sobbing at the kitchen table...Then I asked her what had happened. 'Nothing,'she said. 'I was thinking about that man...I started thinking about...if he and his wife and their other child are okay, and I don't know. It just got to me.' 'I know,' I said, because I did know. Sometimes it's safer to cry about people you don't know than to think about people you really love.
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.
You'd only write what you know and what you know is what you do and the people you know. So you'd write about them or the people you have met casually. It's part of your life.
I find the characters in my head and the more I write about them, the better I get to know them.
There's no doubt about it: fun people are fun. But I finally learned that there is something more important, in the people you know, than whether they are fun. Thinking about those friends who had given me so much pleasure but who had also caused me so much pain, thinking about that bright, cruel world to which they'd introduced me, I saw that there's a better way to value people. Not as fun or not fun, or stylish or not stylish, but as warm or cold, generous or selfish. People who think about others and people who don't. People who know how to listen, and people who only know how to talk.
So many of my songs are based on things that either happened to me or to someone I know, but there are also ones where I've written a made-up story. All of them are about very real emotions, and I just find different ways to express them.
People say to write about what you know. I'm here to tell you, no one wants to read that, cos you don't know anything. So write about something you don't know. And don't be scared, ever.
The single best way to develop leaders . . . is to take people out of their safe environment and away from the people they know, and throw them into a new arena they know little about. Way over their head, preferably. In fact, the more demanding their challenges, the more pressure and risk they face, the more likely a dynamic leader will emerge.
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