Journalists and everyone in America has a constitutional right to express themselves or write what they want to write.
I write in that space between Ella's childhood and mine. I know it all sounds a bit sinister.
All I ever wanted to do is to write stories that people will enjoy and feel at home with.
As soon as I read that, it clicked: that's my theater of war. It was exciting to think that I could write about World War Two from a totally new place.
People write negatives things, cause they feel that's what sells. Good news to them, doesn't sell.
When I first started looking at Twitter, I followed people like Steve Martin, who will just write the funniest non sequiturs now and then, which I thought was really fun. That's kind of the road I've taken. Every now and then, something comes into your mind and you put it out there. It's very innocuous. I think it's kind of fun.
At a certain moment, I decided to write a story. I had no more small children to tell them stories.
I do write long, long character notes - family background, history, details of appearance - much more than will ever appear in the novel. I think this is what lifts a book from that early calculated, artificial stage.
My older brother always tells me I changed as a person when I saw 'Ace Ventura.' Because when I saw 'Ace Ventura', I became obsessed. I watched the movie as many times as I had to - back then, you couldn't go on the Internet and find the script - so I watched it as many times as I could to write my own script of 'Ace Ventura.'
It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.
I want to make films and write films, which will happen, I'm just taking a different route right now. I'm a bit of a chameleon with the whole entertainment industry so to speak.
Romantic comedies are backbreaking to write because they have to be fresh.
To write well you must be willing to go naked into the world.
I love music in general. It's like girls and their clothes and shoes; when you love shoes, you love shoes. So, for me, I think it's a really dangerous thing to say I'm going to write the best dance song in the world.
I would write 100 jokes a day. Most of them were terrible. But I just said, 'I'll write more than everybody else, and that's how I'll get better.'
Every spare second I would write, somehow. On my lunch hour, too.
When the narrative itself starts knocking on the glassed-in box that was your prescription for how you were going to write this novel... you have to listen to it.
Each book has been different and has been challenging in its own way to write.
When it comes to poetry, I think partly the numbers of people attempting to write poems is probably a result or the reaction to technology.
I would not want to write something about something I do not think about.
I think it's kind of difficult to write a good Christmas song because you have a narrow framework of references that you have to work within, and at the same time you want to do something that's personally original and hopefully somewhat unique.
Writing is what I do. It's like breathing to me at a certain point, but if I couldn't write, I do like cooking.
The frustrations and joys of parenthood are just hard to understand until you have a kid... the constant fight you're having with yourself, like loving being with your kid but also being kind of bored and wanting to look at your iPhone - it's kind of an interesting thing that's hard to write about before you've experienced it.
Books, I don't know what you see in them. I can understand a person reading them, but I can't for the life of me see why people have to write them.
I don't write historical novels but novels that wonder, 'And what if it happened in this way and not in this other one?'
I'm trying to write a TV show. Ideally it would be just a reality-TV show, getting the guy who played Eddie Winslow and Kirk Cameron to live in a house. The Jehovah's Witnesses would come to the house a lot or something like that. I kind of like the idea of Scientologists and Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses trying to convert Kirk Cameron.
I can write most places. I particularly like writing on trains. Being between places is quite liberating, and looking out of the window, watching a procession of landscapes and random-ish objects, is very good for stories.
Why do I write? It's not that I want people to think I am smart, or even that I am a good writer. I write because I want to end my loneliness.
There's a lot of reflection that goes on whenever I write a song - it's been a wild whirlwind last couple of years and there's a lot to talk about, and hopefully that's evident in the music.
Well it kind of is project to project because as a writer I think you always write to some degree about things that you know or things that happened - but my favourite filmmakers, my favourite movies of theirs tend to be the personal movies.
I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.
I like to write in a shroud of secrecy because I have to keep finding ways to scare myself.
If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?
I write by myself initially. That's the way I've always written, just working on pure thought by myself. Then I bring it to the table with whoever I'm collaborating with.
I am so happy that I didn't go to school and I didn't have anyone to tell me how to position my fingers on the piano correctly. And what you do with music and what is the correct way to write it and what is not the correct way to write it.
Twenty years on, the books are still fun to write and I've still got lots of stories I want to tell, mainly about social injustice and people chewed up by the system.
