I really love writing comedy. Writing romantic comedy is even nicer because you get to write about how insane we all act when we're falling in love.

Theatre was an art form that I didn't really respect, and because I wanted to shake it up and do different things on stage, I was able to combine all the things I'd learnt through writing on my own.

In writing, I apply my feminine side and respect the mystery involved in creation.

With all respect, I'm sure that we have enough preachers in the world. Through my way of writing, I was capable of being able to say these things and yet not make a person feel as though they're being preached at.

My personal relationship with Ali began in 1988, when we met in New York to explore the possibility of my writing the book that ultimately became 'Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times.'

When I first started drawing the earliest incarnation of 'Optic Nerve,' I hadn't even been on a date; I hadn't had a romantic relationship of any kind yet, so in a way, I was almost writing science fiction.

People don't really have a relationship with great writing or great production or great art direction or great direction. They just sort of admire it.

I've always had this interest in sibling relationships because I don't have any siblings. I'm completely a product of the one-child policy in China, so I always kind of wished that I had an older brother or a younger brother or sister just to have that bond, so I find myself constantly writing about that relationship.

Whether you're keeping a journal or writing as a meditation, it's the same thing. What's important is you're having a relationship with your mind.

So when I started writing my own stuff, it was with a lot of combinations and time changes and power.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

I am a woman, and I am a Latina. Those are the things that make my writing distinctive. Those are the things that give my writing power.

I love writing songs. I love doing my radio show and talking to the fans and listening to what they have to say, but there's a certain responsibility that comes along with being given the gift of music. I take that seriously, but at the same time I try to use it to do something that makes a difference in a positive way.

So, you know, when I think of survival as a creative act, it's not trying to plaster over the isolation or to, you know, rewrite your predicament into something positive with a happy ending or some kind of neat resolution. It's writing into the unknown.

Frankly, writing poetry for children is plain old fun, and I consider myself blessed to have such a delightful career.

Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.

Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it; it was my great refuge through adolescence.

Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

And inasmuch as the bridge is a symbol of all such poetry as I am interested in writing it is my present fancy that a year from now I'll be more contented working in an office than ever before.

I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.

I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.

Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.