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.

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.

I probably wouldn't be a songwriter if I didn't grow up the way I did. It was difficult and it was at times very scary to grow up in a household so unsettled and at times very violent. But, it also, I guess it earned me a sort of wisdom at a young age that's served me well.

No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, and the wisdom of cookbook writers.

One of the great things about being a writer/journalist is that my boss loves me to go out and do features on being someone else. I did a feature on Kate Middleton, where I went to an incredible fancy state home in the countryside, put on a wedding dress and posed for engagement pictures with a fake Prince William.

On the publicity tour of 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding,' I was asked over and over again, if, as the writer, I felt it was a fair depiction of real life to have someone of my er, below average looks, hook up with hottie John Corbett.

A writer's job is to tell the truth.

A writer should have this little voice inside of you saying, Tell the truth. Reveal a few secrets here.

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.

You have to believe in yourself and only trust your own vision and instincts. If I'd listened to what other people thought about my work in the first 10 years that I was a writer, I never would have made it to begin with.

With comedy, I think it's so important, especially in TV, to know and trust what the writers are writing and just have it down.

You have to first be a writer and somebody who loves to write. If I couldn't travel, I would still write.

I just don't see myself as a travel writer. I can't. I don't.

Travel definitely affects me as a writer.

Novels by British writers are among my favorites because our family has enjoyed travel in England and because they are written with an economy of words as if they were written with a pen instead of a computer. Penelope Fitzgerald is a favorite.

I had started writing as a poet in a closed, post-Revival, claustrophobic world, where the shadows of the national upheaval and the intense effort - the intense self-conscious effort - to make a literary movement were still evident. Now we lived a life as writers that was more cosmopolitan, more open, that had more travel and exchange.

Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I've never been able to understand this sort of fear.

There was a time in the 1930s when magazine writers could actually make a good living. 'The Saturday Evening Post' and 'Collier's' both had three stories in each issue. These were usually entertaining, and people really went for them. But then television came along, and now of course, information technology... the new way of killing time.

My mom is a teacher, my dad was a writer for television, his dad was a writer for television, and combining those two has been sort of the goal of my life.

I'm a teacher and a writer; my life is words. When I see the denigration of language, it hurts me, and it's easy to denigrate a word by trivializing it.

Given my age, I am pretty near the end, probably, of my career as a writer, a scholar, a teacher. And I wanted to speak of things I will not be able to do.

I think if I hadn't been a writer, I'd have been a teacher like my dad. He was a college professor, and one of my greatest regrets is that he passed away before I was able to prove to him that I wasn't going to be stuck working at Rax Roast Beef for the rest of my life!