As a writer, I've tried to avoid strong opinions about morality. You just want to present things as they are and let the viewer come to their own conclusion.
We just got a tour bus. I didn't know tour buses could be this nice. It's just me, Brian Haner the guitar guy, the tour manager and a writer. We laugh ourselves silly. Apparently we're going to have a road dog, a miniature pincher. It's the smallest they've ever seen. How masculine am I going to look, working with dolls and a miniature dog?
When the Beatles wrote 'Paperback Writer,' it couldn't have been the same old thing. You can hear so many influences in it, from the blues to Bach, and it's not just verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge chorus. They start off singing a cappella, almost like a Bach chorale, and the song goes into this bluesy guitar riff.
A hidden nerve is what every writer is ultimately about. It's what all writers wish to uncover when writing about themselves in this age of the personal memoir. And yet it's also the first thing every writer learns to sidestep, to disguise, as though this nerve were a deep and shameful secret that needs to be swathed in many sheaths.
I would never want to deny my Mennonite background and culture; I'll always feel like and be identified as a Mennonite and therefore possess that little extra authority on our beliefs. I also see myself as a Canadian writer.
I loved writing when I was a kid and thought about being a writer then. But I didn't have the confidence or belief that I could earn a living that way, so I never took myself seriously.
I haven't always been a writer and I suppose I tiptoed around the idea of writing full time, because it's so isolating.
I've been many kinds of writers in my career: novelist; tele-playwright; short story writer. As a high-school student, I wrote amateur pieces for fanzines, and I've written for Hollywood.
If you want to tell stories, be a writer, not a filmmaker.
There was a time before I felt I was a real writer, when I was a yarn spinner and I just wanted to tell story until it was over. But then there came a time where I was like, 'No, I want to understand something through writing this that I might have not understood before. I want people to come away with something to think about.'
I think Bhutanese food - long dissed by every food writer out there - has gotten a bum rap.
English food writer Elizabeth David, cook and author Richard Olney and the owner of Domaine Tempier Lulu Peyraud have all really inspired the way I think about food.
I got to do Disney Sunday movies. I got to do a TV pilot there. And it really helped me to realise that I needed to not just be a writer, but a producer, to see my work up on the screen the way I wanted it to look and play.
My freshman English professor at Kent State University in 1984 told me I was a good writer, and she loved all the silly pictures I drew in my notebook. She said I should try writing children's books, and so I did.
It's not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, 'Read,' but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, 'Don't read, don't think, just write,' and the result could be a mountain of drivel.
Jacqueline Rose was so wonderful in so many ways, and I was really blessed to be her daughter. Of all the things I am because of her - there's no question: I am a writer because of her love of books.
The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.
When you've finished reading every last thing by a famous writer, literary convention holds that you move on to his or her letters, the DVD extras peddled by publishers.
Both Springsteen and Michael Jackson, who had these huge productions, could always scale them back down to just a song and a melody. All of that influences me. I also try to be a fictional writer, and sometimes I get close, but the things that resonate the most with me - and with everyone else - is what's real.
It was one of those early mid-life crises, really. I started asking myself, 'What is it that I want from my life?' This question kept haunting me: 'Do I want to be a lawyer who always wanted to be a writer, or do I actually want to be a writer?
As a writer, you live in such isolation. It's hard to imagine your book has a life beyond you.
I think the purpose of the writer is to help us see. The writer is someone who can perhaps have the joy of helping others see.
I tried to get people at 'South Park' into 'Downton Abbey,' and it didn't work. I think they were like, 'Downton Abbey?' What?' And I kinda made a big plea in the writer's room, like, 'Guys, you should really watch it. It's good. It's addicting. My wife and I are obsessed with it.'
I don't think of myself as a writer.
I am a regular writer in Mexico, and I always tell the truth in my writings.
The environment in a writer's room, I've really come to feel, should be some form of democracy.
Most of my writer friends are women, and they're all extremely talented, so of course I think the state of contemporary fiction for women is pretty great. Which is to say there is a ton of amazing work out there. These women are writing hard. There's much to be said. We're on it, chief.
I guess it's ridiculously romantic, but I wanted to be a full tilt, sink-or-swim writer.
When I started writing, I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I've gone on. I certainly don't feel I need his approval, although maybe that's because I'm confident that I've got it.
If I'd learned nothing else, it was this: If you want to be a great writer, be a man. If you can't be a man, write like one.
I do like to work on a Marvel method, so if I've got the opportunity, and the writer is happy to do it, I like to have a writer detail what happens on a page, but not saying what happens in every scene.
I don't think anyone sits down and thinks, 'I know, I'll be a chick-lit writer.' You write the book that you want to write and then other people say, 'Oh, that's chick-lit.' You say, 'Okay.' But it's not like you look around and go to a careers fair and there will be someone at the chick-lit author stand.
Usually, as a fiction writer, you get e-mails saying, 'I liked your book,' or 'I didn't like it.' You don't get something saying, 'I'm really glad this is in the world.'
I was always attracted and repelled by the idea of being a writer.
I never wanted to write. I just wrote letters home from a kibbutz in Israel to reassure my parents that I was still alive and well fed and having a great time. They thought these letters were brilliant and sent them to a newspaper. So I became a writer by accident.
