I'm not really one for fancy big words and poetry and the scriptwriters worked very hard on 'Paradise Lost' to translate it.

I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.

France is not poetic she even feels in fact a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.

On Memorial Day I don't want to only remember the combatants. There were also those who came out of the trenches as writers and poets who started preaching peace men and women who have made this world a kinder place to live.

I have a huge respect for writers and realise that this is not an area that I find easy. I doubt that I would have the patience in front of a blank sheet of paper to become a writer.

As for goals I don't set myself those anymore. I'm not one of these 'I must have achieved this and that by next year' kind of writers. I take things as they come and find that patience and persistence tend to win out in the end.

My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems seeing a painting listening to some music some opera which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.

I'm intrigued by films that have a singular vision behind them. A lot of studio movies have ten writers by the time they're done. You have a movie testing 200 times making adjustments according to various people's opinions. It's difficult to have an undistilled vision.

I think more than writers the major influences on me have been European movies jazz and Abstract Expressionism.

I have come to understand and appreciate writers much more recently since I started working on a book last fall. Before that I thought golf writers got up every morning played a round of golf had lunch showed up for our last three holes and then went to dinner.

I'm not one of those writers I learned about who get up in the morning put a piece of paper in their typewriter machine and start writing. That I've never understood.

We are used to female writers who use their private lives as unmitigated material being somewhat hormonal this somehow 'excuses' what might be seen as a highly unfeminine ability to turn their personal upsets into money.

Everything starts and ends with the song and working with writers and really learning their process and craft was an invaluable experience.

Probably having fallen in love with music and movies at a young age and then first learning about writing by kind of following the path of writers like Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs and being a rock journalist.

I've seen a lot of the United States having stayed in so many different cities and towns for work. It's such a strange and fascinating country and instead of learning about it through a textbook I would rather discover its history and traditions and institutions through fiction and nonfiction writers.

I do remember actually learning chords to Beatles songs. I thought they were great songwriters.

I am involved with 'Write Girl ' which is such a great organization because they go into inner city schools and work with underprivileged girls to pair them up with other writers. And it gets them learning to express themselves and become familiar with their own voice. They have a 100% success ratio getting those girls into college.

I think my knowledge of music theory is rooted in jazz theory and a lot of the writers of standards - Rodgers and Hart and Gershwin.

The thing with film and theater is that you always know the story so you can play certain cues in each scene with the knowledge that you know where the story's going to end and how it's going to go. But on television nobody knows what's going to happen even the writers.

If you desire information on some point of law you are not likely to ponder over the ponderous tomes of legal writers in order to obtain the knowledge you seek by your own unaided efforts.

As writers become more numerous it is natural for readers to become more indolent whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

Science fiction writers I am sorry to say really do not know anything. We can't talk about science because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial and usually our fiction is dreadful.

It's definitely true that there are a lot of the devices we used on 'Star Trek ' that came out the imagination of the writers and the creators that are actually in the world today.