A lot of time you write out of some unconscious place. I try to trust what is coming and where it wants to take me.

You never know if you're a writer. You can't trust it. If you woke up and said 'I'm a writer ' it would be gone. You wouldn't see anything for miles - even the dust would be running away.

Writing doesn't come real easy to me. I couldn't write a novel in a year. It wouldn't be readable. I don't let an editor even look at it until the second year because it would just scare them. I just have to trust that all these scraps and dead-ends will find a way.

How I work is I work from of very character-driven place. And I trust the writers.

One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing.

As time goes by I realize that I do trust the wind. And I often write my songs for myself.

Every time I make American film I just trust American directors and American writers.

You have to first be a writer and somebody who loves to write. If I couldn't travel I would still write.

You become a better writer by writing. You become a better travel writer by writing about travel.

But he knew people and he was head writer for Have Gun Will Travel and if you took those early Star Treks that we did and put us in a western wardrobe and put us on wagon train going west we can say the same lines.

I just don't see myself as a travel writer. I can't. I don't.

I don't write under the ghost of Faulkner. I live in the same town and find his life and work inspiring but that's it. I have a motorcycle and tool along the country lanes. I travel at my own speed.

Travel definitely affects me as a writer.

Until the June 1967 war I was completely caught up in the life of a young professor of English. Beginning in 1968 I started to think write and travel as someone who felt himself to be directly involved in the renaissance of Palestinian life and politics.

There are days when I intentionally don't write. For instance I never write when I'm traveling because travel is a situation where I can learn more by looking and listening than by working.

The fact that people will pay you to talk to people and travel to interesting places and write about what intrigues you I am just amazed by that.

I am traveling less in order to be able to write more. I select my travel destinations according to their degree of usefulness to my work.

A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere travels on the ground sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it and has a hard time and then comes back and writes about it. It's not about inventing.

I was born to travel and write verse.

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says but to go off with him and travel in his company.

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.

Every time I write something I think this is the most offensive thing I will ever write. But no. I always surprise myself.

When I write stuff and I help cast it I turn away good people all the time. I may turn them down because this one's too tall and that one doesn't have a high enough voice or this one looks to old to match up with that one - there's a billion reasons not to hire somebody.