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

When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous.

I'm not a writer. I think I can write short stories and poetry but film writing brilliant film writing is a talent - you can't just do it like that.

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.

I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.

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.

One of my biggest pet peeves is that I just don't like it when characters do things that are funny to the writer but you don't know why they're doing it and it doesn't make any sense.

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 cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.

To be misunderstood can be the writer's punishment for having disturbed the reader's peace. The greater the disturbance the greater the possibility of misunderstanding.

As a young boy I read 'Cheaper by the Dozen' and immediately became neurotic about my use of time. It taxed me severely but only for the next 50 years. But I think it also allowed me to discipline myself to sit in the chair and be a writer where one of the most needed qualities is patience.

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.

Do you want to be an artist and a writer or a wife and a lover? With kids your focus changes. I don't want to go to PTA meetings.

I never sort of thought of myself as a comedy writer by nature.

I've only been to Ireland once and I felt I would wake up with voices in my head almost like music and that if I were a songwriter I would be very inspired.

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 clearly most well known for my music. Eventually ultimately I'll be writing books. I'm still writing articles now. I just consider myself a writer.

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.

Listen there are some movies that are set in stone and the writer or the director does not want to change but I've never worked on a movie including my own that didn't take advantage of a rehearsal process.

I write plays and movies I live and work at the borderline between word and image just as any cartoonist or illustrator does. I'm not a pure writer. I use words as the score for kinetic imagistic representations.

I feel I want to grow as an actress and be better. I want to progress as a singer and songwriter and produce movies and everything. So there'll be no time when I feel I've done it all.