There's a relationship between music and spirituality and inspiration and to a certain extent improvisation that draws me in, because I don't totally understand it. I know that those relationships have been telling me, since I started making records, where to go. What to write down.
I write by stealing time. The hours in the day have never felt as if they belonged to me. The greatest number has belonged to my day job as a physician and professor of medicine - eight to 12 hours, and even more in the early days.
In order for me to write, I have to experience life. I write the songs based on real life, and I perform them from a very real place.
I never plan a structure. I like surprises. I'm quite disciplined and sit at my desk every day and just write.
I could not sit down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life.
I don't care what I do - act, stand-up, write, direct - it doesn't matter as long as I'm being creative and it's good work.
My screenwriting credits in my career are probably not dissimilar to some other ones in the sense that a lot of the scripts you write don't get made, and the ones that do get made are certainly - as a writer, they're not your vision.
What I write, if you have to label it, is crossover, and I think that much of the stuff that is called children's or YA is in fact crossover and is equally valid for anyone who likes to read fantasy.
I'm a 24-hour tweet machine, I'm a 24-hour blogger. When there's no pressure on me, I can talk and write and lecture with the best of them. But put a deadline on me and I start getting writer's block.
I'd quite like to write a book about comics, actually. But trying to write about comics as literature, which I don't think anyone's really done before. Sometimes they're more like fan books, and I'd quite like to write one about the Marvel universe over the last 50 years. It's an unprecedented achievement to create that length of continuity.
I can't tell you the number of stories I've told with a female protagonist don't get bought, or they do get bought and get changed drastically. Or, I will literally write into the script different races, and they get cast all-white. I hope that stops and it opens the door for more voices to be heard in movies.
I don't really have a metaphor for how I write, but it kinda feels like chipping away at a big dark object that I can't really see.
I write differently from the way Glen used to. I haven't written very much lately, I mean, since I've been in the group, but I'm starting to now more. And just the fact that I'm there instead of Glen means that the others do everything differently. Cos they have to adapt it to, like, fit in with me, do you know what I mean?
Hebrew is my first language, so it's really the most personal and the most simple. When I write in Hebrew, I don't look for sophistication in music; it's just pure emotion that comes out.
People don't understand how much time and work it takes to make somebody laugh, and how hard it is to write a script, to put together the story, the characters. When everyone laughs simultaneously, there's no greater feeling.
It seems like whenever you write about Muslims, people assume that you're writing about the Quran, you are writing about the Prophet Muhammad. There's no sense that Muslims are capable of individualism, that they're capable of making mistakes that are somehow not connected to Islam.
I put a lot of myself into my characters when I write.
Why should I write a play? I don't have to write a play, do I? But somehow, I think that's what I'm here for, so I'd better do it.
I want to write music that will outlive me.
I tend to write one character at a time. But I don't write the entirety of one character at a time.
Mrs. Miniver was an ordinary middle-class English housewife, a character created by Jan Struther when she was commissioned by the 'Times of London' to write a weekly 'cheer-up' article in 1937.
As for writing novels - it's what I've done for 30 some-odd years. I can't suddenly say I'm going to take up golf. I need something in my life. As long as I can write a coherent sentence, I'll keep at it.
I'm like any other composer. If you give me five years to write a symphony, I'm still going to be asking for more time two days before it's due.
I'd love to write a song that someone else sings that can actually sing really well.
The ability to write and read books is one of the things that transformed us as a species.
I like to knuckle down and get on with my job. I'll make mistakes, I'm bound to, but I'll write them down and I'll learn from them.
As a writer myself, my job has very often been to also write on the job. So you get the script and a vague idea of how the scene might work, and you then add funny words or change the script. I'm not the world's best writer or the world's best actor, but I can do that thing where I can fix - or ruin - fix-slash-ruin, add quirk, add value.
I write songs for people who drive in cars. I really do.
When I wrote about the French Revolution, I didn't choose to write about aristocrats; I chose characters who began their lives in provincial obscurity.
When I left 'Being Human,' that was painful because the show was going on without me. But with 'Him & Her,' we finished on such a high together that if it is the end, it couldn't have stopped at a better time. But I hope with 'Him & Her' that we'll get another crack of the whip: that the writer might change his mind and write some more.
In L.A., we have a saying - 'What do you do?' It's less of a question and more of a self-defense mechanism for wayward screenwriters looking to slip you a first draft, or the occasional actor looking to get in on the latest shoot. But I hate the question because of my own answer - I write about games.
Exposing characters and their shortcomings gives me great comfort. It's always great to write about someone more mixed up than yourself.
When you write something, at first you might feel very defensive and protective of every single thing, but after a while, you just see what works and what doesn't. Sometimes you do test screenings, and an audience tells you that, or sometimes you eventually just go, 'Let's cut the joke out.'
Instrumental music can be about anything. It's about a mood, and I usually title my instrumental songs long after they're written. Sometimes I figure out the titles when I'm doing the CD package, and that's very common for a lot of people who write instrumental music.
I love creating that community and writing about that place, because I think, in some ways, Bois Sauvage is like the DeLisle of my past; it's like the DeLisle of the '80s that I can never return to. So in some ways, when I write about Bois Sauvage, I'm writing about a home that I've lost.
Life being so short, and the possible books to write so many, it's good to function by night as well as by day; but would anybody become a writer if they realised at the outset what the working hours were?
