My journals were a clearing house - a garbage can. Once I was writing seriously, I understood that this was the stuff that didn't belong in my work.
You know, when you're making a record, you come up with 15, 20 songs. Then they start to fall by the wayside as your interest wanes. It's kind of like a process of elimination to determine which songs wind up on the record.
I go through a thousand songs to find ten for a new record.
I spent 90 percent of every day saying no to dopey ideas.
I don't play everything I write. I mean, everything I write is not that good. I bring out into the world the ones I think that are really worthy of an audience's attention.
When you take something extremely broad, then it is not a work of expansion or work of compression. It's hard because you have to decide what to throw out.
You would not believe some of the scripts I have seen. I have read something like 160 that I've rejected, and I keep them all, for posterity.
We usually overrecord. Then we boil it down to the cream of the cream.
I have a lot of scripts that come my way, and some of them take a bit longer to read than others. There are a lot of things that I have to pass on because I'm just not into it, and sometimes the story is slightly forced.
