I wrote The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God in five hours but I had it all planned out. It isn't poetry and it does not pretend to be but it does what it sets out to do.

One of the things I've always liked about my husband is he's very good at lots of stuff. He was an English teacher when I met him. He wrote poetry and played the guitar. As time went on he decided to go into economics so he's very analytical and mathematical in addition to his artsy side.

What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel read 2 000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

Most people can't tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can't be related to other forms of historical poetry.

I was a visual artist primarily and a writer even from a very young age. I wrote a lot of stories and poetry and... I had a desire to create always. And I always had a desire to show my work.

I wrote things for the school's newspaper and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry.

I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals but even as I withdrew into this reading I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.

In my late teenage years I developed a real passion for it and wrote a lot of poetry.

I was one of those dark quiet kids that wrote poetry.

I always wrote poetry and stuff like that so putting songs together wasn't that spectacular.

You know bad poetry I wrote in high school can still be found on the Internet and you know there's a Web log of our college newspaper. You know there's so many different stages of my creative development are sort of on-record if somebody were to choose to look for them.

I was a 16-year-old girl at one point so of course I wrote poetry.

But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.

When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call but I wrote letters I wrote short stories I wrote books.

Peace Train is a song I wrote the message of which continues to breeze thunderously through the hearts of millions of human beings.

No 'F/X 2' was a job. I enjoyed doing it but that was definitely a job. I wrote that I didn't direct it but 'Candyman' and the earlier horror movies I made I was completely into horror and suspense and always have been. It's informed everything I've done even the way scenes are shot in 'Kinsey and 'Gods and Monsters.'

I had a couple of movies that I was passionately involved with that I could never get made. 'Richard Pryor ' I wrote for - gosh - over a year. That was close to getting made for two-and-a-half years after that. We're still pushing it you know. It is weird. Suddenly you wake up and it's like 'God five years have gone by.'

When I wrote the song I had the sea near Bombay in mind. We stayed at a hotel by the sea and the fishermen come up at five in the morning and they were all chanting. And we went on the beach and we got chased by a mad dog - big as a donkey.

As soon as I began it seemed impossible to write fast enough - I wrote faster than I would write a letter - two thousand to three thousand words in a morning and I cannot help it.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

Every article I wrote in those days every speech I made is full of pleading for the recognition of lead poisoning as a real and serious medical problem.

I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy.

I don't think my wife likes me very much when I had a heart attack she wrote for an ambulance.