In fiction writing, I would say there are several different strands that have been woven through my own writing, and each influenced by a different group of writers.
there was no crime in unconscious plagiarism; that I committed it everyday, that he committed it everyday, that every man alive on earth who writes or speaks commits it every day and not merely once or twice but every time he open his mouth… there is nothing of our own in it except some slight change born of our temperament, character, environment, teachings and associations
What I'm thinking about are the millions of people, many of whom write me very personal letters :"Dear Mr. President: I did not vote for you. I was against Obamacare. And then my son who didn't have health insurance signed up and we just found out that he had an illness. And thankfully he's now covered, otherwise he might not have gotten treatment and I might have lost my house."
I do not waste my time writing pot-boilers: the pot must be boiled, and even my pot au feu has some chunks of fresh meat in it. ...I have no time to boil myself down; and anyhow I could not do so and preserve all the necessary nutriment and the flavoring on which the digestibility depends.
Anybody can have ideas-the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.
The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible.
Sometimes, even when I'm writing the lyrics, I'm not sure what I'm getting at, but then months will pass and I'll listen to it and I'll understand it completely. I think I trust myself in that most of what comes out of me will be honest. Even if it seems like it doesn't make a lot of sense, I realize that it does. It's hard to follow, and maybe there's a lot of subtext to it that nobody knows, so it makes it impossible to follow.
Writing the record for me - every record is almost a surprise. When people ask me, what are the themes you want to grapple with on this one? I have no idea until the record's finished.