I grew up on the crime stuff. Spillane Chandler Jim Thompson and noir movies like Fuller Orson Welles Fritz Lang. When I first showed up in New York to write comics back in the late 1970s I came with a bunch of crime stories but everybody just wanted men in tights.

I think more than writers the major influences on me have been European movies jazz and Abstract Expressionism.

Listen there are some movies that are set in stone and the writer or the director does not want to change but I've never worked on a movie including my own that didn't take advantage of a rehearsal process.

I love it man I'm 23 years old and I'm lucky enough to write movies as a job! I just feel really blessed and can't believe it's happening.

I think our culture has gotten so skewed. People assume that because you're an actor you want to write a book to exploit your celebrity but my celebrity is only a byproduct of me making movies. I have no intention of being a celebrity.

I just like to act and write and produce. To me making movies is the ultimate goal.

I write plays and movies I live and work at the borderline between word and image just as any cartoonist or illustrator does. I'm not a pure writer. I use words as the score for kinetic imagistic representations.

As far as writing I like watching bad movies. Nothing stops me in my tracks more than watching a great film like 'The Godfather' or 'Dog Day Afternoon' or 'The Graduate.' You watch one of those and you never want to write again. Whereas with bad movies it makes you think If that counts I certainly could write.

I feel I want to grow as an actress and be better. I want to progress as a singer and songwriter and produce movies and everything. So there'll be no time when I feel I've done it all.

I spent all my time on my movies worried that people were eating and that the schedule was being kept so to have experts in those areas giving me the brain space as a writer and director is huge.

I wanted to write and direct movies and not be forced to adapt them from a bestselling book.

I write in the morning I walk in the afternoon and I read in the evening. It's a very easy lovely life.

For the first-time novelist you've got to get up at 5:30 in the morning and write until 7 make breakfast and go to work. Or come home and work for an hour. Everybody has an hour in their day somewhere.

I'm a morning person because I learned to write my novels while still practicing law. I would get to the office at 6:30 a.m. and write until other people arrived around 9. Now I still do that. I start at 6:30 or 7 and I'll write until 11 then take an hour off then work until about 2 p.m. By then my brain has had enough.

I have come to understand and appreciate writers much more recently since I started working on a book last fall. Before that I thought golf writers got up every morning played a round of golf had lunch showed up for our last three holes and then went to dinner.

I write best in the morning and I can only write for about half a day that's about it.

I don't know any other lifestyle. I get up in the morning and I really do feel that the world is my oyster and I start that way the same as I would if I were preparing to write a song: put a blank piece of paper up on the piano and you go for it.

The process hasn't changed but the writer has developed. I still get up every morning and go to work.

I get started at 5:30 in the morning and write till 10 A.M. Then I hike six or seven miles before going back to work.

You know I mean this sincerely you know I'm so grateful that I get to get up in the morning and do this you know and write books.

At the very end of a book I can manage to work for longer stretches but mostly making stuff up for three hours that's enough. I can't do any more. At the end of the day I might tinker with my morning's work and maybe write some again. But I think three hours is fine.

I did that for 40 years or more. I never had any writer's block. I got up in the morning sat down at the typewriter - now computer - lit up a cigarette.

I get up in the morning torture a typewriter until it screams then stop.

I write early in the morning usually after reading portions of at least half a dozen newspapers on the web.