I spent all my time on my movies worried that people were eating and that the schedule was being kept so to have experts in those areas giving me the brain space as a writer and director is huge.

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.

The process hasn't changed but the writer has developed. I still get up every morning and go to work.

I did that for 40 years or more. I never had any writer's block. I got up in the morning sat down at the typewriter - now computer - lit up a cigarette.

I get up in the morning torture a typewriter until it screams then stop.

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in you know just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing a character came sort of strolling in and I realized Oh my God I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.

I am a morning writer I am writing at eight-thirty in longhand and I keep at it until twelve-thirty when I go for a swim. Then I come back have lunch and read in the afternoon until I take my walk for the next day's writing.

Those golden minutes before you are completely awake when your mind is just drifting you have no censorship you are ready to develop any kind of idea. That's when I come up with the best and worst ideas. That is the privilege of being a writer - that you can stay in bed for an hour in the morning and it's work time.

I was a government employee in the morning and a writer in the evening.

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.

I hear that 5 o'clock whistle in my mind like Fred Flintstone and I have to stop. I'm also not much of a morning writer. I have a sweet spot from about 11am to 4pm. But I really work during that time.

As far as I'm concerned the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning.

There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know the third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings.

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.

I turned down twelve films last year... Huge money films but I had no respect for the writer or the work.

The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.

I wasn't always a writer. When I went to college and majored in fine arts I was a painter. Then I was a stay-at-home mom.

But the fact is I'm not work-identified. I'm not a lawyer or a writer. I'm a mom and I'm a woman and that's the kind of people I want to see in books in the starring role.

I've always been a writer because I've always been a student. My mom's a retired professor so I come from a very academic background. I love writing you know?

I don't practice but I am still officially in paediatrics. I keep in touch with journals and I have a very good data bank of medical information and there is a key thing for a writer knowing where to go. I know where to go to get the information that I need.

Even in the beginning when we knew there was a legal argument about how much our song sounds like his song as one songwriter to another I wasn't sure that Cat Stevens would take that as bad.

You know my first three or four drafts you can see are on legal pads in long hand. And then I go to a typewriter and I know everybody's switching to a computer. And I'm sort of laughed at.

The nice thing about being a writer is that you can make magic happen without learning tricks.

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