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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I think young writers should get other degrees first social sciences arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to find information.

The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past just as it is bound to modify the future.