Listen a cable series is a beautiful thing because there's such amazing writing happening on television and it's a schedule that allows you to do a play or two. There's a reason everybody wants that job!

As an editor I read Charlotte Rogan's amazing debut novel 'The Lifeboat ' when it was still in manuscript. I read it in one night and I really wanted my company to publish it but we lost it to another house. It's such a wonderful combination of beautiful writing and suspenseful storytelling.

I feel like writing a book there's always a version in your head that's an amazing version but then you write the version that you can write.

I left my job in the fall and now I can set my life up around writing instead of squeezing writing into my day it's amazing to have that time and I feel very lucky.

The strangest thing that human speech and human writing can do is create a metaphor. That is an amazing leap is it not?

I was writing a scene where a guy was choking another guy to death. You can go online and type 'chokeholds' and watch scenes where martial artists choke each other out. You can hear what noises they make when they go unconscious see how their bodies flop and everything. YouTube is amazing for the more detailed stuff.

I know this is going to sound corny but I love my life. I love my baby so I love getting to wake up with him. And I have the most amazing job with writing that any actor would love and costars who I can't wait to see on Monday mornings. And I love coming home to my husband.

When Maurice touched a keyboard it was like something from a movie magical. He would always give you something from a movie and you'd go what did you just play... immediately inspirational writings amazing. That's what we're going to miss.

If you're writing you're starting in private. It can really be this amazing private freeing experience. Forget that it's for other people - that comes in later.

At that time I had recently finished a book called Amazing Grace which many people tell me is a very painful book to read. Well if it was painful to read it was also painful to write. I had pains in my chest for two years while I was writing that book.

For the last 20 years of my life I've had the mantra to do amazing parts with amazing people in amazing projects so I'm attracted to good story writing and character and good people. That's what I'm always searching for and I don't think that's ever going to change.

I like pens. My writing is so amazing there's never a need to erase.

I have two ideas for novels at the moment neither of them all that conventional but I'm not ready to choose between them yet let alone settle down to the process of writing.

The next thing I wrote was in a writing class at night school. It was about a poor woman who worked at a dime store and who was all alone for Christmas in Laurel Mississippi.

The writing is really hard. You're alone. It really pulls it out of you. You pull it out of your head. But when you're a director you're shopping - you're picking this actor you're picking this scene. It's like the most intense kinetic high-speed shopping of all time. You sit in a chair and it will all come rushing at you like a wind tunnel.

The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away alone and get to work.

It helps to be able to be alone. 'Cuz writing is done alone unless you collaborate but I don't do that. Ask my ex-wife.

What does it mean to not be alone? I've approached that question through music technology writing and other means.

Good acting is all in the writing. If it isn't on the page then it really won't make any difference. You cannot act on force of personality alone.

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family friends and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone uninterrupted and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.

I was very happy sitting alone at a dining room table writing a script.

The daily act of writing remains as demanding and maddening as it was before and the pleasure you get from writing - rare but profound - remains at the true heart of the enterprise. On their best days writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers all alone in their studios with no one watching.

If I was writing songs just for me I'd only play them in my living room alone.

I'm very shy really. I spend a lot of time in my room alone reading or writing or watching television.