Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning truth beauty.

The world is a crazy beautiful ugly complicated place and it keeps moving on from crisis to strangeness to beauty to weirdness to tragedy. The caravan keeps moving on and the job of the longform writer or filmmaker or radio broadcaster is to stop - is to pause - and when the caravan goes away that's when this stuff comes.

I mean the beauty of being a writer is it's not like being a swimmer. When they were talking about our Olympic swimmers and they'd say 'Oh she's so old ' and she's all of 25 or something. So the beauty for a writer is that you can keep doing it right into your dotage and I hope to be able to keep doing it as long as I can get away with it yeah.

Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract to express it in the most general terms to find some universal formula for it.

As an inspiration to the author I do not think the cat can be over-estimated. He suggests so much grace power beauty motion mysticism. I do not wonder that many writers love cats I am only surprised that all do not.

Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in 'Black Mask' magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.

For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.

I'm very happy to hear that my work inspires writers and painters. It's the most beautiful compliment the greatest reward. Art should always be an exchange.

Artists don't talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers it's stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work.

It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946 when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.

Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book If art doesn't make us better then what on earth is it for.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene and as if by magic we see a new meaning in it.

The writer when he is also an artist is someone who admits what others don't dare reveal.

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.

You know 'The Golden Girls' was a very unusual show to start on. I was young and it was a show about old people and it was a very traditional show but it was also an amazing training ground for a joke-writer. It forced me to learn those skills.

I would love to work with Paolo Nutini because he is so soulful and an amazing songwriter.

Success breeds volume and it's just amazing how many young writers artists and musicians there are in town.

I've known Shawn for several years. And he's just an amazing talent. He's a great writer a marvelous marvelous guitar player and plays really good fiddle.

I think one of the coolest things about the job is the level of trust we have for each other. The actors fully trust that the writers will write amazing episodes and the writers trust that the actors will follow their instincts with the characters.

It feels amazing to work with writers that write really well.

I mean there are some amazing storytelling being done on the small screen right now. That's what so cool about being in television right now. Studios networks are starting to throw more resources better writers more production values... and to be part of that is awesome.