A Quote by Steven Wright
I never even thought of myself as deadpan until someone wrote an article about me about a year after I was doing comedy. There was a paper called the 'Boston Phoenix,' and someone wrote a description of what I was doing and that's where I first saw 'deadpan.'
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I took to writing as my medicine to help me stay afloat in acting career journey. I wrote about me breaking hearts, and my heart being broken. I wrote about my views whether they were liberal or conservative. I wrote about everything. I wrote about my life. When I did not have paper coming in as green backs, I'd use random pieces of paper for stories. It was like, I got no money, but I have paper to write. So I wrote.
But my comedy hero was Stephen Chow. His deadpan comedy, all the stuff he wrote like 'From Beijing with Love,' it's incredibly funny.
When I wrote for myself before as an artist, I probably wrote about 15, 20 songs a year. I thought that was a lot. Then, when I first started writing for the people, I wrote, like, 65 songs in a year for two years in a row.
When I was doing comedy in New York, before I was in movies, I was never known as the deadpan actress. I was just a comedienne.
Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.
Men saw the stars at the edge of the sea They thought great thoughts about liberty Poets wrote down words that did fit Writers wrote books Thinkers thought about it.
It's more in retrospect as I've thought about it over the years and look back at what I wrote, how I wrote things - like there's a song that Ralph Stanley later recorded with me that he had guested on my record what was called "Travelers Lantern" that I wrote as basically, you know, a hymn.
I remember the first article I ever wrote, and I saw my name in the paper, and I already knew I was undocumented, and I was thinking: 'How can they now say I don't exist?'
I once saw John Updike get in front of a crowd and read a story that he'd written in 1958, and I just thought, I can't even look at stuff I wrote a year ago, I can't believe he's doing this.
I thought of all the magazine article I'd read on mothers who worked and constantly felt guilty about leaving their children with someone else. I had trained myself to read pieces like that and silently say to myself, 'See how lucky you are?' But it had been gnawing at the inside, that part that didn't fit, that I never let myself even think about. After all, wasn't it a worse kind of guilt to be with your child and to know that you wanted to be anywhere but there?
I started off doing indie comics that I wrote and drew myself. I was doing those for ten years before I started to work for DC. The first book that I wrote for DC was for another artist. I did some backups in 'Adventure Comics' years ago starring The Atom. That's the first time that I ever wrote for another artist.
'Would I mind if someone wrote a sequel to one of my books?' I asked myself, and I decided that I wouldn't, providing that the writer was respectful, had read my book first, and wasn't drunk when doing it.
At Princeton I wrote my junior paper on Virginia Woolf, and for my senior thesis I wrote on Samuel Beckett. I wrote some about "Between the Acts" and "Mrs. Dalloway'' but mostly about "To the Lighthouse." With Beckett I focused, perversely, on his novels, "Molloy," "Malone Dies," and "The Unnamable." That's when I decided I should never write again.
I thought that I wrote songs and wrote music, and that was sort of what I thought I was best at doing. And because nobody else was ever doing my songs, I felt - you know, I had to go out and do them.
The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment – to put things down without deliberation – without worrying about their style – without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote – wrote, wrote…By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught.
I was an avid reader, but never thought seriously about writing a novel until I was in my thirties. I took no formal fiction-writing courses and never thought about these categories when I wrote my first novel.
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