One of the things I really love about TV is this symbiotic relationship you can get between the writers and the actors and the characters start to come to life because you start to collaborate.

I've discovered just how symbiotic the relationship is between writers directors and actors. They ask the same questions and strip down texts in exactly the same way.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar is the test of their power.

It's the writers' job to make it positive. It's my job to make it real.

I know many writers who first dictate passages then polish what they have dictated. I speak then I polish - occasionally I do windows.

All I knew about Ethiopia was from a few records that I like as well as what I read about the famine. But you get there and it's another world. It's filled with art and music and poetry and intellectuals and writers - all kinds of people.

I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers their trying their hand at poetry.

I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could but it takes devotion and talent.

I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do I'll write a bad poem.

I'm not really one for fancy big words and poetry and the scriptwriters worked very hard on 'Paradise Lost' to translate it.

I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.

France is not poetic she even feels in fact a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.

On Memorial Day I don't want to only remember the combatants. There were also those who came out of the trenches as writers and poets who started preaching peace men and women who have made this world a kinder place to live.

I have a huge respect for writers and realise that this is not an area that I find easy. I doubt that I would have the patience in front of a blank sheet of paper to become a writer.

As for goals I don't set myself those anymore. I'm not one of these 'I must have achieved this and that by next year' kind of writers. I take things as they come and find that patience and persistence tend to win out in the end.

My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems seeing a painting listening to some music some opera which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.

I'm intrigued by films that have a singular vision behind them. A lot of studio movies have ten writers by the time they're done. You have a movie testing 200 times making adjustments according to various people's opinions. It's difficult to have an undistilled vision.

I think more than writers the major influences on me have been European movies jazz and Abstract Expressionism.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.