I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That's the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about.

I don't think you ever stop giving. I really don't. I think it's an on-going process. And it's not just about being able to write a check. It's being able to touch somebody's life.

Life's like a movie write your own ending. Keep believing keep pretending.

You must understand the whole of life not just one little part of it. That is why you must read that is why you must look at the skies that is why you must sing and dance and write poems and suffer and understand for all that is life.

Truly I never thought of myself as writing legal thrillers and I still don't think I do. I write stories about women.

I do have two data identities. I have my name Bruce Sterling which is my public name under which I write novels. I also have my other name which is my legal name under which I own property and vote.

Even in the beginning when we knew there was a legal argument about how much our song sounds like his song as one songwriter to another I wasn't sure that Cat Stevens would take that as bad.

I write in longhand on yellow legal pads.

You know my first three or four drafts you can see are on legal pads in long hand. And then I go to a typewriter and I know everybody's switching to a computer. And I'm sort of laughed at.

I mean in some cases with libel laws you know they can write things about people who have no course of action because they can't afford to take legal action against them.

The nice thing about being a writer is that you can make magic happen without learning tricks.

Coming to understand a painting or a symphony in an unfamiliar style to recognize the work of an artist or school to see or hear in new ways is as cognitive an achievement as learning to read or write or add.

Pop songs are not as graceful as they used to be. Performers today haven't gone through the regimen of learning how to write. And of course everyone wants to own copyrights.

Everything starts and ends with the song and working with writers and really learning their process and craft was an invaluable experience.

An important aspect of the current situation is the strong social reaction against suggestions that the home language of African American children be used in the first steps of learning to read and write.

I want to direct produce and write learning as I go.

I spent many years trying to write a lot like Ben Folds or John Lennon or Rivers Cuomo. I think that's healthy when you're learning to write and seeing how chords fit together and how songs take shape.

I think my books talk about kids learning to like and respect themselves and each other. You can't write a message book you just tell the best story you know how to tell.

Early on it's good to develop the ability to write. Learning to write is a useful exercise even if what you're writing about is not that relevant.

Probably having fallen in love with music and movies at a young age and then first learning about writing by kind of following the path of writers like Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs and being a rock journalist.

The hardest thing was learning to write. I was 13 and the only writing I had done was for Social Studies. It consisted of copying passages right out of the encyclopedia.

Isn't one of your first exercises in learning how to communicate to write a description of how to tie your shoelaces? The point being that it's basically impossible to use text to show that.

I've seen a lot of the United States having stayed in so many different cities and towns for work. It's such a strange and fascinating country and instead of learning about it through a textbook I would rather discover its history and traditions and institutions through fiction and nonfiction writers.

I think my family and closest friends are learning about my need to withdraw and I am learning how to restore and store my energy to both serve the community to the best of my ability and to serve my writer's heart.