I was really exposed to great old-time literature - the classics, the poetic realists like Strindberg and Ibsen and all those guys. I was really inspired by all those guys. That's when writing became a primary focus.
One of the reasons that I think I do love to write is because I did have a difficult childhood and not so great teenage years. It always helped me escape from my problems.
The only difference was one of them was trying to make a perfect cake and one of them was trying to write a great book. But if we remove that from the equation, it's the same impulse and they are equally entitled to their ecstasies and their despair.
It's so great in Hollywood now. You have people past 40 sitting and talking about serious stuff, writing and making movies and TV, but there's laser pistols and superheroes and alien monsters involved. It's viable and mainstream.
One of the great lessons I learned about historical fiction from writing 'Loving Frank' is that you don't try to disguise what people did; my approach was to try to understand the characters and why they did what they did.
Writing is getting killed by too many chefs. Back in the Bogart days, it started with great scripts. You had a writer, and he wrote a script, and that was your movie. I think that's been watered down a bit lately.
To say that I have an undisciplined mind would not be incorrect overall, but it's a little off the mark because I have great discipline when I write - but only for about ten minutes.
The person who should really write an appreciation of the late great Dom DeLuise is Burt Reynolds, who, even more than Mel Brooks, made of the jolly, beanie wearing fat man a side-kick and a legend.
L.A. is a great place to write because you have a lot of space. I have a big office at home, I can leave the doors open. Flowers bloom all year. But it's unglamorous in all the right ways.
And truly, when you look at the Constitution and our founding fathers and their writings, the things that made this country great, you might draw those conclusions: That they were conservative. They were fiscally conservative and socially conservativ...
Every time one can write a self-deluded song, you are way ahead of the game, way ahead. Self-delusion is the basis of nearly all the great scenes in all the great plays, from 'Oedipus' to 'Hamlet.'
The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all other woes of mankind, is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box. But it is quite another thing to open the box.
During my past career as a journalist, I relished writing obits and equally dreaded phoning relatives for the necessary facts. But to my surprise and great relief, they often wanted to talk - they wanted their recently deceased loved ones recorded in...
You don't sit up in a cave and write the Great American Novel and know it is utterly superb, and then throw it page by page into the fire. You just don't do that. You send it out. You have to send it out.
What I always wanted to get seen as was as a good actor, when it was the acting I was doing. When I'm writing, I want to try to be seen as a good writer.
I'm a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don't agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.
But typically for a project like the Mac, the size we had was pretty good. And it has different stages. The team grows as you have to write manuals and do testing... though the Mac had no formal testing.
I'm not precisely saying that a really good board meeting at the MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives Coucil) makes me want to go and write poetry, but there is a pleasure in doing that sort of thing well.
Novelists are no more moral or certain than anybody else; we are ideologically adrift, and if we are any good then our writing will live in several places at once. That is both our curse and our charm.
I know, if I am playing well, I can be as good as anyone, and I want to show people who write you off and forget about you.
I edit as I write. I revise endlessly. I don't go forward until I know that what I've written is as good as I can make it.
