Although Kurt Vonnegut may not be considered a humor writer 'Breakfast of Champions' is one of the funniest books I've ever read.

But it also became the experience or was the experience of the writers who were attracted to this kind of humor. They're all men or women who come from the same kind of experience in their own lives.

Some major writers have a huge impact like Ayn Rand who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction but it really isn't fiction at all.

Feature-length film comedy is harder to pull off than the episodic sitcom - it doesn't have the same factory machinery up and running teams of writers putting familiar characters through permutations - but that doesn't explain the widening quality gap that makes movie humor look like a genetic defective.

The nation that complacently and fearfully allows its artists and writers to become suspected rather than respected is no longer regarded as a nation possessed with humor or depth.

I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are you come out and hope that no one runs away.

Chemistry is not anything an executive producer or writer can orchestrate or plan you just hope for it.

Ironically Latin American countries in their instability give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed.

But what I hope for from a book - either one that I write or one that I read - is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don't want to think of the writer.

I think almost every writer in the world would hope that books would be always talked about with respect and civility and depth and seriousness.

I don't think I'm a great songwriter but I think I've learned a lot about it and I don't think there's any one way to do it. I don't think I can control it at all. I can just kind of hope that it happens.

It's possible that I've matured as a writer and I hope I've matured emotionally but I always find myself revisiting these adolescent scenes.

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.

If you're a misanthrope you stay at home. There are certain writers who really don't like other people. I'm not like that I don't think.

So we come out to Los Angeles. And we met with every network. We met with show runners directors writers everything. And what we had an idea for they didn't like. And what they had an idea for we didn't like. So we went home.

Home base is the support system where we have a culinary team my own writers because of the shows and the books and stuff we have a culinary team of about six people. Marketing public relations accounting and all that sort of stuff.

It's not a bad thing for a writer not to feel at home. Writers - we're much more comfortable at parties standing in the corner watching everybody else having a good time than we are mingling.

I got a lovely check today from being a writer that I earned by sitting at home. That's rewarding.

Since I was there in the very beginning I know the history of the characters. So I make comments about the tone and sometimes remind the writers that we've done that before.

Gay writers now have both a sense of history and the fables that allows them to dwell in the realms of the ridiculous and at the same time talk seriously about things.

It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she or he is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.

Every writer has his writing technique - what he can and can't do to describe something like war or history. I'm not good at writing about those things but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece but he cannot of course create it.

Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance.