I'm a fairly fast, but sloppy writer, so I'm a big fan of re-writing, and re-writing again.
By writing quickly we are not brought to write well, but by writing well we are brought to write quickly.
Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly.
'Walk With Me' was written really fast, and that one is about togetherness.
In the TV business, you've got to write fast, and someone will tell you, 'Can you rewrite this episode before... 6 P.M.?' So that's when you rewrite it. You can't wait for the muse to show up.
I take a certain pride in having maintained a reputation for fast copy throughout my newspaper career. Fast-breaking stories left my typewriter in a hurry. Not great literature, perhaps, but fast, and usually accurate.
I'm a fast writer, and crime novels are easy to do. It's much harder to write a 1,000 word article, where everything has to be 100 per cent correct.
I actually wrote the lyrics for 'Goodbye' in 10 minutes.
I try to write very fast. I don't revise very much. I write the poem in one sitting. Just let it rip. It's usually over in twenty to forty minutes. I'll go back and tinker with a word or two, change a line for some metrical reason weeks later, but I try to get the whole thing just done.
Literally wrote 'Starboy' in 30 minutes.
A.J. Liebling, one of my heroes, used to say that he could write better than anyone who wrote faster, and faster than anyone who could write better. I'm one nine-hundredth as good as Liebling, but that principle may slightly apply.
The fastest I've ever done a book is a 112,000-word book in about a month.
I don't think the process of writing books is in any way sensible. It's not logical, and it's not reasonable. I do write very fast, and I just do it in a binge. Other people binge-drink; I binge-write.
As soon as I began, it seemed impossible to write fast enough – I wrote faster than I would write a letter – two thousand to three thousand words in a morning, and I cannot help it.
I don't write all the time. But if I'm writing something, I'll just bang into it every day until it's finished. I write pretty quickly.
I'm trying to learn how to write faster.
So many good songs get written fast, because you know exactly what has to work.
What everybody is well advised to do is to not write about your own life, this is if you want to write fast. You will be writing about your own life anyway but you won't know it.
My secret is simple. I have a very short attention span, and writing lots of things fast appeases that very attention span.
The most common misperception about me is that I write fast. I just write often. Every hour that I can.
I discovered, to my surprise, that writing for live television made me a faster writer.
I kind of like to write fast. It keeps the pacing up. And it keeps me off the streets.
The first thing is, you can't write movie music if you don't know how to write quickly.
I used to joke about this but I've recently realized that I really believe it: I spent many years training myself to write very slowly for pretty good money. So the idea of writing really quickly for free offends me.
Writing about 2,000 words in three hours every morning, 'Casino Royale' dutifully produced itself. I wrote nothing and made no corrections until the book was finished. If I had looked back at what I had written the day before I might have despaired.
