I save the best of myself for novels, and I believe it shows.
If a writer stops observing he is finished. But he does not have to observe consciously nor think how it will be useful. Perhaps that would be true at the beginning. But later everything he sees goes into the great reserve of things he knows or has seen.
I figure 1000 words a day, or four pages, and sometimes I'll write more, but I'll try not to. Because I think you don't want to exhaust what it is you're writing about, so the next day you would have to gear up for a brand new scene.
One would be lying if one didn't say that one had melodies that I keep in my back pocket.
I am uncomfortable talking about the things that I write. It seems unseemly to me. I have no problem at all when I see anybody else talking about the same project, but I feel my work should speak for itself.
When you get to the fourth, fifth and sixth years of a show, it's really good to have held back, so that you have somewhere to go. That also applies to levels of violence, levels of humor, levels of production value.
Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven't made is to talk about the unwritten book.
writers of novels are so busy being solitary that they haven't time to meet one another. But then, a writer learns nothing from a writer, conversationally. If a writer has anything witty, profound or quotable to say he doesn't say it. He's no fool. He writes it.
I have a lot of songs that I kind of put away, and I don't let anybody else hear them, and those are my songs.
And I liked that whole idea that energy comes from not disseminating your ideas and talking about them.
The better the writers the less they will speak about what they have written themselves.
