Steven Wright Quotes

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

If I was at school and one of my friends said something funny, I'd write it down in a notebook and take it to the writers meetings. I never told my friends about it. I just thought I could incorporate stuff that was true to life.

In order to get new things to rap about, you've gotta live.

For me, you have to not have a formula. You have to not even sit down and say, 'I want to write right now.' It has to just kind of come out. It's not something you can plan.

I tell my writing students that everything is material; just pay attention.

I think writers are observers and watchers. We always have our ears open and eyes open, so I might see something in everyday life that inspires me. And I think that's probably more than anything else. Everyday life is where I get my inspiration.

When I get into the studio, it's not about trying to get a good song, it's about whatever comes naturally.

I like to sit down every day and not know where the book is going. I have no idea where the book is going to go or how it's going to end as I'm writing it.

I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.

Sometimes I'm asked if I do research for my stories. The answer is yes and no. No, in the sense that I seldom plow through books at the library to gather material. Yes, in the sense that the first fifteen years of my life turned out to be one big research project.

I think what happens to young writers is that they use up every life experience that they have had up to that point for their first novel. Then you have to come up with something for the second novel, but you really don't have anything to say.

All stories come from the subconscious - which is why it doesn't make sense to over-plan.

Whatever I'm writing comes organically out of my life.

I think I take little pieces of inspiration, then kind of do what's real to me and what's going on in my life or what I observe from other people's experiences and hope other people connect with it, too.

In order for me to write, I have to experience life. I write the songs based on real life, and I perform them from a very real place.

Sometimes things just fall out of your head on the paper, and if you're smart, you learn not to touch them.

I think a part of the reason that those early plays were short was that I just kept having these ideas, and I'd just go off and write them. I wasn't trying to write one-act plays - it's just how the ideas would be expressed. Every condition I was in seemed like it could be a play.

Anytime I have an idea, I'll make sure that I put it down so that when we do sit down to write an album, I don't have to dream it all out of thin air. I don't have to be creative on the spur of the moment, or spontaneously artistic. I just take advantage of whenever creativity strikes.

I remember that when I got to NYU, everyone was writing scripts. But I was 18 at the time, and when you write a script, so much of it is about what you pull from life, and this sounds sort of cheesy, but I felt like I didn't have enough life experience at that point to write a movie.

I always like to write where I'm at in real life into whatever I'm working on.

You've got to live life to write a book about it.

Every writer is going to end up drawing from their own experiences in one way or another.

It's not that I sit down and write great stuff without thinking, not at all. Most of it is terrible. But the stuff that feels fun and fresh to me tends to happen fairly unthinkingly.

You don't have to go fight bulls in Spain like Hemingway to write something great, or go off to war. It's right under your nose.

When you're writing, you're putting thought into what you want to express, and then you come up with it - it comes to you. When you're improvising, it's the same thing. You're writing. You just say it out loud right then, instead of saying, 'You think this might work?'