Quote

Sometimes a writer just needs a hook.

It's kind of like a challenge to myself to be able to hear somebody else's hook and kind of interpret the words. Because my own hooks, I already know what I mean when I write them.

I used to write things out beforehand. But sometimes it backfires.

I push myself in a lot of aspects when I write a song. I write a piece and where most people would stop and say, 'Oh, that's the hook right there,' I'll move that to the first four bars of the verse and do a new hook.

I'm one of the writers that would die if I didn't say what I needed to say. For me, it's a matter of survival to write.

The whole point of writing is to have something in your gut or in your soul or in your mind that's burning to be written.

Once I have a hook I think has potential - enough to spin out more than a hundred thousand words, then I start turning my attention to characters. Who are these people? Why did this thing happen to them? But the hook always comes first.

It's one of the most liberating things I experience in writing - letting yourself get rid of a gesture or character or plot point that always nagged, even if you couldn't admit to yourself that it did.

Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.

Many times I have written something, and after it was published, I understood what I was saying.