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 think my family and closest friends are learning about my need to withdraw and I am learning how to restore and store my energy to both serve the community to the best of my ability and to serve my writer's heart.

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.

If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge and if he's good the older he gets the better he writes.

If I have enough ego to say I'm a writer a director a producer and an actor I should have the energy and the knowledge to write a scene for this great actor named Henry Fonda and direct him in it and have it work.

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.

Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft - not simply for his books but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.

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.

That writer does the most who gives his reader the most knowledge and takes from him the least time.

It's part of a writer's profession as it's part of a spy's profession to prey on the community to which he's attached to take away information - often in secret - and to translate that into intelligence for his masters whether it's his readership or his spy masters. And I think that both professions are perhaps rather lonely.

The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the imagination.

Richard Hugo taught me that anyone with a desire to write an ear for language and a bit of imagination could become a writer. He also in a way gave me permission to write about northern Montana.

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.

The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.

Then there was Clark Ashton Smith who wrote for Weird Tales and who had a wild imagination. He wasn't a very talented writer but his imagination was wonderful.

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

Someone once said that history has more imagination than all the scenario writers in the Pentagon and we have a lot of scenario writers here. No one ever wrote a scenario for commercial airliners crashing into the World Trade Center.

My parents thought it was nice to develop my imagination but they never seriously thought that anything would ever come of it. They said that I couldn't be an actress because I would be taller than all my leading men so I thought I would be a writer instead.

A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.