I'm not famous for my back story investigations I'm lucky that I work with good writers and it's usually in the script.

There's the famous thing that the A&R man from the record company is supposed to do: He's supposed to come into the studio and listen to the songs you've been recording and then say 'Guys I don't hear any singles.' And then everybody falls into a terrible depression because you have to write one.

I have a great job writing for 'The Office ' but really all television writers do is dream of one day writing movies. I'll put it this way: At the Oscars the most famous person in the room is like Angelina Jolie. At the Emmys the huge exciting celebrity is Bethenny Frankel. You get what I mean.

I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.

Nashville is one of the greatest places for the best songwriters in the world. It's been fantastic to live there and to raise our family there. It's a great town.

What I want to do is tell stories about normal people in the American suburbs. I don't write the book where it's a conspiracy reaching the prime minister I don't write the book with the big serial killer who lops off heads. My setting is a very placid pool of suburbia family life. And within that I can make pretty big splashes.

All the songs I write are about human dynamics whether it's with girlfriends boyfriends or family.

It's not an accident that both my sister and I are writers. Our parents created an accidental Petri dish. My family has great storytellers and I grew up in a very funny conversational house and didn't have television. This small family farm was a bubble world that didn't have much to do with reality.

They needed someone to write a script of The Great Gatsby very quickly for the movie they were making. I took this job so I'd be sure to have some dough to support my family.

Never write an advertisement which you wouldn't want your family to read. You wouldn't tell lies to your own wife. Don't tell them to mine.

In every song I write whether it's a love song or a political song or a song about family the one thing that I find is feeling lost and trying to find your way.

And when I was young my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think I don't think anyone in my family would really feel I'd done them an injustice by saying that. We didn't see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home.

I've never had a divorce but I've seen so many of my friends my sister my family go through that stuff so I try to write for the people that can't write about it. I take on their sorrow so I'm able to kind of express it or their joy.

In times when religious or political faith or hope predominates the writer functions totally in unison with society and expresses society's feelings beliefs and hopes in perfect harmony.

That bedrock faith that I could write was what blinded me to attempts to discourage me.

You just kind of have faith. If that sounds kind of mystical it's because I really don't know how it works but I trust that it does. I try to write the way I read in order to find out what happens next.

I just can't say enough about the actors having faith and trust in the writers and the writers having faith and trust in the actors.

Writers now are putting total faith in designers at Apple and Amazon. It's almost like a race-car driver having no input into how cars are designed.

My gut feeling about sequels is that they should be premeditated: You should try to write a trilogy first or at least sketch out a trilogy if you have any faith in your film.

In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write.

But whatever my failure I have this thing to remember - that I was a pioneer in my profession just as my grandfathers were in theirs in that I was the first man in this section to earn his living as a writer.

Every book I've written has been a different attempt to understand something and the success or failure of the previous one is irrelevant. I write the book I want.

That sense of failure I don't know where people put it who don't write songs and aren't able to emote physically. It must go somewhere.

I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.