Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

A spy like a writer lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.

Some writers can only deal with childhood experience because it's complete. For another kind of writer life goes on and he's able to keep processing that as well.

One nice thing about being a woman in Hollywood is that the women tend to be very close-knit. All of us writers and directors know each other and cling to each other for safety and support and it's really a completely different vibe than the men experience out here where they're all trying to murder each other.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Every secret of a writer's soul every experience of his life every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

As many political writers have pointed out commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.

It's commonly said that people who've been ill in childhood and who've had an upset education never really regret that they do. It means that you don't look at the world in the way that other people do and if you were inclined to be a writer that's a help.

A writer should get as much education as possible but just going to school is not enough if it were all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.

There were all us baby boomers who had a grammar school education started to learn then went on the pill the whole thing and so there are today a lot more women writers editors producers and so a lot more women's stories. God the BBC's practically run by women.

The education that prepared me was my general education classes which I tried to avoid when I was a stupid undergraduate but which gave me the foundation of general knowledge that makes a career as a writer possible.

Perhaps all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels male as well as female.

The hoary joke in the literary world based on 'Dreams From My Father ' was that if things had worked out differently for Barack Obama he could have made it as a writer.

Screenplays I didn't really care about journalism travel books getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.

I feel more influenced in my own work by dreams than I do by other writers' works in a way. Or by popular culture movies - what else is there to write about than love and loss?

Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description as science writers but there are bad dreams as well as good dreams. We're dreamers you see but we're also realists of a sort.

I think there's a time as a writer when you want to see the best things in life and you go out wherever you go with your dreams as a writer or a composer.

Writers write. Dreamers talk about it.

Different people have different styles but there is an opportunity as a director to be a writer in every moment with every visual cue and every piece of production design. Everything is a decision and everything can be obsessed over.

I wear a lot of different hats - from writer to producer and artist. We all do 5 or 6 jobs everything from creating our own graphic design to actually recording and the whole bit.

Stargate by far is the top of the pile when it comes to Sci-Fi. The quality is great. They have really good writers production design lighting wardrobe.

Music is where I have the most creative freedom but I love producing. To me that's kind of where all the action is. You get a chance to have your hands in every aspect of a film. From picking a director sometimes picking a writer to the actors the wardrobe set design editing music and marketing.

I'm not on the run from anything and I'm not at all clear about what I'm running towards. But as some great writer put it I want to be certain that when I arrive at death I'm totally exhausted.

The writer crafts their ideal world. In my world everyone has really long conversations or just picks apart pop culture to death and everyone talks in monologue.