Life is a very orderly thing but in fiction there is a huge liberation and freedom. I can do what I like. There's nothing that says I can't write a page of full stops. There is no 'should' involved although you wouldn't know that from literary reviews and critics.

I have more freedom when I write fiction but my memoirs have had a much stronger impact on my readers. Somehow the 'message ' even if I am not even aware that there is one is conveyed better in this form.

Those who write the editorials and those who write the columns they simply are unaccountable. They're free to impose their cultural politics in the name of freedom of the press.

I will never understand people who think that the way to show their righteous opposition to sexual freedom is to write letters full of filthy words.

A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom.

But I don't think any arranger should ever write a drum part for a drummer because if a drummer can't create his own Interpretation of the chart and he plays everything that's written he becomes mechanical he has no freedom.

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

To become self-aware people must be allowed to hear a plurality of opinions and then make up their own minds. They must be allowed to say write and publish whatever they want. Freedom of expression is the most basic but fundamental right. Without it human beings are reduced to automatons.

Who is more to be pitied a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

When people talk of the freedom of writing speaking or thinking I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.

I live in America. I have the right to write whatever I want. And it's equaled by another right just as powerful: the right not to read it. Freedom of speech includes the freedom to offend people.

The things the writers have me doing on 'Suburgatory' are insane. I think they think it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.

I do not know that any writer has supposed that on this earth man will ultimately be able to live without food.

A lot of food criticism has a similar flavor to it and I'm probably going to write about it in a different way.

I'm not a food critic and I'm not really an authority to write anything on food.

As a freelance writer I'd be asked to become an expert for various magazines on any subject whether food or wine or history or the life span of veterinarians. I was completely unschooled in any of these things.

Part of my job as a food writer is to describe food. So my work on 'Top Chef ' I feel is an extension of that. When we give a criticism to the contestant we want to make sure we tell them why it's not working and why it would work if they did it a different way.

The magazine the daytime show we've always tried to write affordable accessible. Those are key words for us and I do mean us a huge staff of people at the magazine who love to cook affordable friendly food that helps families eat better for less.

It's all about who's where on the food chain. When I'm the story editor I expect my writers to follow my vision. When I'm working for another editor I'm obliged to follow their vision.

Fast food is hugely important in the life of a comedy writer. All we do is order in and what we're going to eat is hotly debated.

There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized or even cured. The only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room where he can endure the acute stages in private and where food can be poked in to him with a stick.

If you want to fight the evil you see in finance and industry get to work reading the corporate filings see if there has been fraud and where you find it report it to the SEC or write about it or blog about it.

I had a fear of becoming anything a fear of becoming a specialist. I might have become a doctor but if you become a doctor that's your specialty in life and you are defined by it. One of the attractions of being a writer is that you're never a specialist. Your field is entirely open your field is the entire human condition.

I fear dying in the middle of a book. It would be so annoying to write 80 000 words and not get to the end. I'm phobic about it. So when I'm writing a book I leave messages all over the house for people to know how the story ends and then someone can finish it for me.