I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing. I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.
I have a love-hate relationship with Twitter. There are moments I feel like 99 percent of the people who write stuff are the sweetest people, and then one crazy guy or girl spoils the whole thing.
I like to write with people I have a relationship with; otherwise it's kind of scary, and you hold back because you don't want to pour your guts out to someone you never met.
I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can't be like any other author's really.
I have always loved science, but I have always loved the arts - drawing, painting and, yes, writing - more.
Over the last 25 years, since a lot of science writing became accessible to layman, I've become quite a consumer of science. As a child, I wasn't streamed into science, and I regret that now.
When I was with the Labor Party, I'd get into trouble because the party bosses determined that some of what I wrote, or proposed to write about, wasn't conducive to their policies or to electoral success.
I feel incredibly fortunate to have had the level of success I've had. I was just writing stories for my own sons.
Sometimes I just want to write a really intense love scene. But I can't do that in my books for teens, or parents will complain - believe me, I've tried.
I love meeting 'the Odd Man Out' - like fans of 'Baywatch' who regret, as I do, that Tower 12 Productions didn't put nearly as much energy into writing and directing the show as they put into photographing and editing it.
Through Twitter, I've got a writing career and a directing career, as well as hundreds of other beneficial things that have happened to me. I love it.
I actually love Stephen King's writing. I mean, we, actually, at Castle Rock, we've made seven movies out of Stephen King books.
I love the op-ed pages of the 'L.A. Times,' the 'Washington Post' and the 'New York Times.' There's just no substitute for the people who are thinking and writing on those pages.
I'm still in love with what I do, with the idea of making things up, so hours when I write always feel like very blessed hours to me.
I was immersed in popular songs of the time, of the '30s and '40s. I was writing songs, making fun of the attitudes of those songs, in the musical style of the songs themselves; love songs, folk songs, marches, football.
Comics is still my first love. But I always did other kinds of writing, too, so I think of myself as a writer first.
I think I really scored with my parents. All of my friends pretty much came from broken homes, and my parents are still together, but not only that, they're still in love and still write together.
I got the writing bug in the fourth grade when a poem of mine was published in the school newspaper. Music criticism came a little later, when I was in high school.
I didn't write any music at all, and then, I remember Jon Anderson being very insistent saying that there were two kinds of musicians: the ones who wrote music and the ones who didn't.
I don't think of my music in terms of a career. I just want to get it out there and do it. I'm not manipulating my sound to be like anybody or trying to write to sound like anybody else.
Whenever I have time, I try to get in the studio and write, whether it's for me or other artists or my catalog of music. It's definitely one of my favorite parts of the music industry.
