I have a way of filming things and staging them and designing sets. There were times when I thought I should change my approach, but in fact, this is what I like to do. It's sort of like my handwriting as a movie director. And somewhere along the way...
I had wanted to be a novelist for so long, but I didn't have a story. That story came from the death of my father, and wrestling with how to help my mother. Writing it allowed me to work through my fears, frustrations and desires. I wanted control ov...
Being someone who had had a very difficult childhood, a very difficult adolescence - it had to do with not quite poverty, but close. It had to do with being brought up in a family where no one spoke English, no one could read or write English. It had...
I don't write from dreams because I don't remember mine, but I had a fragment of an image left about twins, whose father was telling them how their lives were going to go for the next eight years. I wrote a scene about that, and then another and then...
I have very specific advice for aspiring writers: go to New York. And if you can't go to New York, go to the place that represents New York to you, where the standards for writing are high, there are other people who share your dreams, and where you ...
I don't really mind what people say about my love life or anything like that, but the one thing is that, yes, I do sing and write all my own music. That is something that I hold really dear. And yeah, I made a fool of myself in front of the world, bu...
I've always thought Harper Lee might have made a great decision. Much as you'd like to have more books by her, there's something about just one that's kind of mysterious and nice. On the other hand, the New York gossip about me was that I'd never wri...
When I began writing in the mid-1960s, I thought it was not important for readers to know whether I was male or female. Also, I was a great admirer of E.B. White, so I may have thought that it would bring me luck to submit my first manuscript as 'E.L...
I'm not a wildly gifted person; I don't play an instrument or speak another language or have great accomplishments in another field, as many writers do. But writing feels natural to me; the act of it seems to free up my unconscious, so that sometimes...
But, yeah, I'm really happy when I'm writing. When I'm being creative and when I have something that I can put down. You know, if you go out and you overhear a conversation or you have a thought, you have a receptacle to go home and say, 'Oh, this wo...
I don't have time to write a mom blog, but I'm not against it. I think it's great when women talk about things. I'm all about female empowerment. There's a lot of lonely, lost moms out there. Moms need to be encouraged to tell the truth. There's a lo...
We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy. I spent a great deal of time in my younger years just writing and reading, walking around the woods in Ohio, whe...
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 w...
I'm really curious about the memory of Nixon for people who grew up under Clinton. What do people remember of him? In his day, the definition of a conservative right-wing president is more like a centrist in our own time. He's also one of our funnier...
I had written a book. For various reasons, the publishing industry had decided that my book was going to be 'important.' The novel had taken me 12-and-a-half years to write, and after being with the book for so long, I had no real perspective on the ...
Most of my teachers wanted to send me to the principal's office. But my fourth-grade teacher once put her arms around me and said, 'You sure write well.' And I've had good penmanship until this day. She was the only one who ever said anything nice to...
My approach to 'Star Trek' was, 'I know science fiction, and I know screen writing.' That was very arrogant of me, but you really need to be a little bit arrogant to think that what you have to say is good enough to justify the expense of hundreds of...
A play is basically a long, formalistic polemic. You can write it without the poetry, and if you do, you may have a pretty good play. We know this because we see plays in translation. Not many people speak Norwegian or Danish or whatever guys like Ib...
Most authors writing books like 'He's Just Not That Into You' dream of doing what I was being asked to do. I didn't like it. I'm good at giving advice, but doing it on TV and radio felt wrong, and when people resisted my point of view, I was like, 'W...
I like to believe that I don't think of myself as a writer. I am an amateur. Back when I was teaching, I wrote when I could. Weekends were good typewriter time. Now, it's whenever I feel there's something to be put on paper. I don't care what time it...
When I write stuff and I help cast it, I turn away good people all the time. I may turn them down because this one's too tall and that one doesn't have a high enough voice or this one looks to old to match up with that one - there's a billion reasons...
