Slash Quotes

I don't have specific music for when I'm writing. I'm usually listening to the same playlist or 'artist' before I arrive at the computer as when I'm walking somewhere after leaving the computer.

When I write, it's intimate. I write in the car, and I don't even hear, like, ambulances driving past me because I'm in my car, listening to the music, writing. I record in an attic with no booth. It's not like I'm in the dark with candles, but it's like a house, a home, and I record like that. I think that plays into the music.

I write to music, so every script I have has its own playlist. Music just opens me up to the emotions that I'm writing.

What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?

I can write anywhere really. I have a hard time writing when the birds are tweeting and the brooks are running outside. I've tried that several times, for months at a time, trying to write in a quiet, wonderful place where birds are twittering and coffee's brewing. And nothing happens. But if I'm in an old dump like my old apartment and I can't find my fingernail clippers and nothing's working except the old tea maker, that's just great. You always have to find and live in a place that's a little uncomfortable when you're a writer. You need a burr in your side.

To write you must be warm, fed, loved and sober.

When I used to write songs, especially on my own, it was just me and a guitar.

I write a lot of my best music in the car, like late night. Three, four in the morning. I'm in the passenger seat, I got my driver, my getaway driver. My Bonnie, I'm Clyde. That's when everything is just settled. In the daytime it's chaotic. Everybody just goin' nowhere fast. In a rush to go nowhere.

I didn't really want to write just lyrics, but I wanted to meet Leonard Bernstein. Music was always the first reason I was writing songs.

You have to give people something to actually write music so that you're not just running your mouth all the time.

Sometimes it takes time to get into what ideas actually mean to you. Even when you're not writing a song, it's like that.

My writing time needs to surround itself with empty stretches, or at least unpeopled ones, for the writing takes place in an area of suspension as in a hanging nest that is almost entirely encapsulated.

It's a really big struggle for me to write a song. Songs take either 30 seconds for me to write or a year or two to piece together, depending on the song and how I'm feeling on any given day. I don't really like to write music at all unless I am completely unbothered by touring.

I was writing a film criticism book on Sergio Corbucci, the director who did the original Django. So, I was kind of getting immersed in his world. Towards the end of the Inglourious Basterds press tour I was in Japan. Spaghetti Westerns are really popular there, so I picked up a bunch of soundtracks and spent my day off listening to all these scores. And all of a sudden the opening scene just came to me.

I prefer to write and draw in the privacy of my home and with total freedom and then take it to the lion's den.

Many friends have said to me, 'I never know when you write your books, because I've never seen you writing, or even seen you go away to write.' I must behave rather as dogs do when they retire with a bone; they depart in a secretive manner and you do not see them again for an odd half hour. They return self-consciously with mud on their noses. I do much the same.

I have a huge music library and deliberately choose the piece of music to match the piece I'm writing. So, every book I write has its own "soundtrack."

I need to write, and I can't write when I'm on the road.

You get caught up in a cycle at some point, so I broke the cycle and decided; I'm going to really write a lot of books, because I need to get in touch with that part of myself in order to make more music.

A book calls for pen, ink, and a writing desk; today the rule is that pen, ink, and a writing desk call for a book.

If I'm writing a novel, I'll probably get up in the morning, do email, perhaps blog, deal with emergencies, and then be off novel-writing around 1.00pm and stop around 6.00pm. And I'll be writing in longhand, a safe distance from my computer. If I'm not writing a novel, there is no schedule, and scripts and introductions and whatnot can find themselves being written at any time and on anything.

I listen to music when I write. I need the musical background. Classical music. I'm behind the times. I'm still with Baroque music, Gregorian chant, the requiems, and with the quartets of Beethoven and Brahms. That is what I need for the climate, for the surroundings, for the landscape: the music.

I always write my novels with music (I don't listened to the music seriously.) Music seems to encourage me.

I usually start writing stories from tone and not from content - kind of like people who create music and invent the lyrics later on.

I should attempt to write a love song, I have written lots of poetry about love so I could turn those into lyrics. I'm a sucker for romance - always have been, always will be. I love walking down the beach and listening to my iPod and belting them out. What would we do without love songs?