I would love to continue in music with writing... but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens I will bow down gracefully raise my kids and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don't need to be blonde when I'm 60!

No matter how many times people say it - 'Oh I'm just writing this for myself' 'Oh I'm just doing this for myself' - nobody's doing it for themselves! You're doing it for an audience. So whether I'm performing or writing a book or playing music it's definitely to be put out there and to be received in some way definitely.

I'm a big collector of vinyl - I have a record room in my house - and I've always had a huge soundtrack album collection. So what I do as I'm writing a movie is go through all those songs trying to find good songs for fights or good pieces of music to layer into the film.

Music is the doorway that has led me to drawing photography and writing.

To me the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about but the inner music that words make.

I like to edit my sentences as I write them. I rearrange a sentence many times before moving on to the next one. For me that editing process feels like a form of play like a puzzle that needs solving and it's one of the most satisfying parts of writing.

I find playwriting to be incredibly difficult compared to screenwriting. Part of it is that I grew up watching movies and not watching plays.

I find playwriting really painful. I love it or I wouldn't do it but I don't love the theater as much as I love movies.

The reason I started writing movies was because I kept getting parts that I just kind of stepped into. I didn't have to do a lot of work and I ended up getting sort of bored.

But when you're writing a script - for me anyway - you have to sort of create an enforced innocence. You have to divest yourself of worrying about a lot of stuff like what movies are hot what movies are not hot what the budget of this movie might be.

I don't know if I see myself as really an action hero but I like doing physical movies and I like doing movies where the writing is very lean.

I'd love to act more. I've had to turn down multiple movies because I was on tour but it's encouraging to know that someday there might be the right role the right timing. And I've been writing a lot of music so hopefully very soon I'll have recorded a project of my own. I also want to get a boat and open a restaurant.

People are always wondering if I am an artist or political activist or politician. Maybe I'll just clearly tell you: Whatever I do is not art. Let's say it is just objects or materials movies or writing but not art OK?

It's so great in Hollywood now. You have people past 40 sitting and talking about serious stuff writing and making movies and TV but there's laser pistols and superheroes and alien monsters involved. It's viable and mainstream.

My movies are unadorned they're not particularly fancy I think they're kind of workmanlike in some ways focusing on the writing and the acting.

But then I go through long periods where I don't listen to things usually when I'm working. In between the records and in between the writing I suck up books and music and movies and anything I can find.

Well Toronto I consider to be the birthplace of my films. I've made three films and this is the third one to premiere here in the same theater on the same day at the same time - they are my audience. They're the people that I think about while I'm writing directing and editing. I specifically make movies for them.

As far as writing I like watching bad movies. Nothing stops me in my tracks more than watching a great film like 'The Godfather' or 'Dog Day Afternoon' or 'The Graduate.' You watch one of those and you never want to write again. Whereas with bad movies it makes you think If that counts I certainly could write.

I've been really enjoying writing articles and writing music and music for movies.

To me movies and music go hand in hand. When I'm writing a script one of the first things I do is find the music I'm going to play for the opening sequence.

I went to Morocco joined a band called Pegasus ran out of money went to Gibraltar and worked on the docks writing songs about the sun and the morning and the birds.

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.

I think I turned to writing really just to wake up in the morning and be a musician and to have something to do and feel like a musician every day even if I wasn't working.

I was half asleep lying there writing this lyric in my head at about 3:30 in the morning. I woke Steve up with this idea and then we went into the living room where there was a little upright piano and finished the song. I wonder where that piano is now?