Good education means learning to read write and most importantly learn how to learn so that you can be whatever you want to be when you grow up.

It's commonly said that people who've been ill in childhood and who've had an upset education never really regret that they do. It means that you don't look at the world in the way that other people do and if you were inclined to be a writer that's a help.

A writer should get as much education as possible but just going to school is not enough if it were all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.

There were all us baby boomers who had a grammar school education started to learn then went on the pill the whole thing and so there are today a lot more women writers editors producers and so a lot more women's stories. God the BBC's practically run by women.

The education that prepared me was my general education classes which I tried to avoid when I was a stupid undergraduate but which gave me the foundation of general knowledge that makes a career as a writer possible.

When I walk up on that shore in Florida I want millions of those AARP sisters and brothers to look at me and say 'I'm going to go write that novel I thought it was too late to do. I'm going to go work in Africa on that farm that those people need help at. I'm going to adopt a child. It's not too late I can still live my dreams.'

Perhaps all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels male as well as female.

The hoary joke in the literary world based on 'Dreams From My Father ' was that if things had worked out differently for Barack Obama he could have made it as a writer.

Screenplays I didn't really care about journalism travel books getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.

I feel more influenced in my own work by dreams than I do by other writers' works in a way. Or by popular culture movies - what else is there to write about than love and loss?

I don't dream songs. I'm more apt to write dreams down and then to be able to interpret them into a song. I also tend to get up and write prose in the morning from which will come songs.

Every year for New Years I write down all of my goals and dreams and put them in my Bible. At the end of the year I go and pull the paper out and check this off and check that off.

Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description as science writers but there are bad dreams as well as good dreams. We're dreamers you see but we're also realists of a sort.

The readers are the ones who let us live our dreams. I try to write books which are really compelling - that you'd take on vacation and rather than going out you'd read in your hotel room because you had to find out what happened. Hopefully that's what readers are responding to.

I might be writing what people expect me to write writing from that place where I might be ruled by economic considerations. To overcome that I started working with my dreams because I'm not so censored when I use dream material.

I think there's a time as a writer when you want to see the best things in life and you go out wherever you go with your dreams as a writer or a composer.

I'm aware of the mystery around us so I write about coincidences premonitions emotions dreams the power of nature magic.

I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It's totally for myself. I never in my wildest dreams expected this popularity.

Writers write. Dreamers talk about it.

Different people have different styles but there is an opportunity as a director to be a writer in every moment with every visual cue and every piece of production design. Everything is a decision and everything can be obsessed over.

I wear a lot of different hats - from writer to producer and artist. We all do 5 or 6 jobs everything from creating our own graphic design to actually recording and the whole bit.

Stargate by far is the top of the pile when it comes to Sci-Fi. The quality is great. They have really good writers production design lighting wardrobe.

I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works but each one launches another. Every constraint even dullness frees up a new design.

I learn my lines while on the golf course. I try to do two or three things at once. I have ideas for books all the time I have ideas for paintings all the time and I write them all down. I take my sketchpad and my iPad which I design on and I do sit down and do specific tasks at specific times.