Yet it ought to be obvious that good music generally occupies a higher plane that mere politics. Great writers can express moods through melody and capture experiences we share most powerfully - love lust longing joy rage fear triumph yearning and confusion.

I never discuss a novel while I'm writing it for fear that talking about it will diminish my desire to write it.

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking what I'm looking at what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

I write for those women who do not speak for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We've been taught that silence would save us but it won't.

I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized and I still had a daughter who I adored and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

Writing is a form of therapy sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write compose or paint can manage to escape the madness melancholia the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

The big thing that everyone forgets you're famous and on TV and everything but I think there's something very rewarding to be able to write a song record it and have it turn out as you heard it in your head or even better.

When I was in fourth grade... this wonderful teacher said you didn't have to write a book report you could just talk about the book you could do a drawing of the book you could write a play inspired by the book and that's what I did. I got to be so famous. I had to go around to every school and perform it. It was just so natural and fun.

My office walls are covered with autographs of famous writers - it's what my children call my 'dead author wall.' I have signatures from Mark Twain Earnest Hemingway Jack London Harriett Beecher Stowe Pearl Buck Charles Dickens Rudyard Kipling Alfred Lord Tennyson to name a few.