It is jazz music that called me to be a musician and I have always sang the songs that moved me the most. Singers like Frank Sinatra and myself we interpret the songs that we like. Not unlike a Shakespearean actor that goes back to the greatest words ever written we go back to the greatest songs.

I'm writing constantly about all my crazy experiences across the world so I have a lot of music I've already written.

Well-written words are music.

I get bored easily so I need to do a lot. I've started a record label so I get to nurture new talent and talk about music which is a passion of mine. I've written another book. And I get to come to work and do the TV show which is always really fun.

The moving finger writes and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit can cancel half a line of it.

I've never written a movie I'm not in the movie business. I go out to L.A. and I'm like everyone else wandering around in a daze hoping I see movie stars. I write the novels that the movies are based on and that feels like enough of a job for me.

But I don't think there has ever been anything written on the nature of violent man as deep and as thorough as Shakespeare's Titus. I think it puts all modern movies and modern exploitations of violence to shame.

In anything I've ever written all the characters sound like me which I don't think is a bad thing. It makes sense. But I had always admired filmmakers who made movies that didn't sound like them at all.

Before I'd written movies I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that.

Another thing that's quite different in writing a book as a practicing newspaperman is that if you look at what you've written the next morning and you think you didn't get it quite right you can fix it.

Some of those more out-there jokes were written in the wee hours of the morning. Somehow they remained funny the next day.

He had written my mother once that he wanted her to be the first thing he saw every morning and the last thing he ever saw. And that's how it turned out.

I think the worst and most insidious procrastination for me is research. I will be looking for some bit of fact or figure to include in the novel and before I know I've wasted an entire morning delving into that subject matter without a word written.

There was a chance for me to write one song for the section where Elvis sat in his black leather outfit and sang the old hits. At eight oclock the next morning I had written Memories.

After my mom died there was so much written about her fashion and her style and all that and I felt that one of the most important parts of her was missing her real intellectual curiosity.

Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men and I will find an excuse in them to hang him.

I have written two medical novels. I have never studied medicine never seen an operation.

You may not be able to read a doctor's handwriting and prescription but you'll notice his bills are neatly typewritten.

Marriage - a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.

Of all that is written I love only what a person has written with his own blood.

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.

I have written about the dispossessed immigrants the condition of women who do not enjoy the same legal rights as men the Palestinians who are deprived of their land and condemned to exile.

Travel provided many interesting experiences but perhaps the most useful lesson I learned was that I really had no proficiency for learning the thousands of characters of the written Chinese language.

Now for this book I had to learn the world of the Senate which is really for all that's written about the Senate an unknowing world and its mores and the way things work with subcommittees and all. I loved learning about that.