And of course there's so much music in and around our family. I had a piano during Christmas because it's obviously useful through the season. There are so many people songwriters who are around.

I've been trying to find women writers for my staff for a while now and I have three women on my staff and three guys so it's pretty equal. I don't know why that is. It's been the same thing for a while. It's hard for female comedians to stand out. That's weird. That's a shame.

One reason the human race has such a low opinion of itself is that it gets so much of its wisdom from writers.

Writing is no dying art form in America because most published writers here accept the wisdom and the necessity of encouraging the talent that follows in their footsteps.

But I do think it's important to remember that writers do not have a monopoly of wisdom on their books. They can be wrong about their own books they can often learn about their own books.

No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers alas have to be fools in public while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.

The reason that war is such a fascinating subject for writers is because it's a revealer. Put a bunch of people in an adrenaline-fuelled life-or-death situation and their fundamental behaviours are exposed the scrim is taken away and the motivations behind each personality come out to play.

Apart from a few simple principles the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears.

How I work is I work from of very character-driven place. And I trust the writers.

Every time I make American film I just trust American directors and American writers.

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.

I think I'm also more open to other writers being present and listening to other opinions whereas before I was going through my angsty teen years while making records.

Since fantasy isn't about technology the accelleration has no impact at all. But it's changed the lives of fantasy writers and editors. I get to live in England and work for a New York publisher!

Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me.

Writers as they gain success feel like outsiders because writers don't come together in real groups.

There's that unwritten schism that literary writers get all the awards and commericals writers get all the success.

The first thing is that we're being attacked by both the Writers Guild and the Producers Guild. Both of these groups are trying to diminish the importance and strength of the director. They're trying to do it through both frontal and side attacks.

I love sports as all Bostonians seem to. I love books and movies as all writers seem to.

I believe that writers unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite are at heart people who live by night a little bit outside society moving between delinquency and conformity.

I've told several writers this and again I get back to it but if you want to make God smile tell him your plans.

I started in this racket in the early '70s and when I was president of the Science Fiction Writers of America of which I was like the sixth president I was the first one nobody ever heard of.

Many writers upon the science of political economy have declared that it is the duty of a nation first to encourage the creation of wealth and second to direct and control its distribution. All such theories are delusive.

We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That's the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don't talk about football or anything like that.

It cannot be said often enough that science fiction as a genre is incredibly educational - and I'm speaking the written science fiction not 'Star Trek.' Science fiction writers tend to fill their books if they're clever with little bits of interesting stuff and real stuff.