I really don't have a lot in common with the people who attend the Comic Con. It's like assuming that all people who write prose are the same.
Nothing so sharpens the thought process as writing down one's arguments. Weaknesses overlooked in oral discussion become painfully obvious on the written page.
Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.
Many fiction writers write for the critics or for themselves; they forget the common reader. I never do. I don't think journalism clashes with my fiction; on the contrary, it helps enormously.
You get so caught up in what you're writing - action sequences tend to do that more than anything else because you're living it, and feeling for your characters.
When I'm writing a book, I prefer not to speak about it, because only when the book is finished can I try to understand what I've really done and to compare my intentions with the result.
My first job on the radio was writing jokes for a Baltimore DJ called Johnny Walker, who was sort of a '70s era shock jock who all the teenage boys listened to in my school.
They may well say not only is this not true, but I will put in an injunction to prevent publication. No, stories don't go in unless I'm convinced by the people who write them that they're true. And if I'm wrong, then so be it.
When things aren't working out, we have a tendency to say, 'Go do other things,' but you shouldn't do other things. You need to stay at your desk and continue to try to write. You need to insist on it.
I don't write for publishers, certainly not for critics, and not for readers, But I am delighted that so many people have found my books enjoyable and want to continue to read them.
I'm the guy who gets uncomfortable. That's why I was able to write 'The 40-Year-Old Virgin' and 'Knocked Up.' I believe in those guys.
I'd have to say that my favorite thing is writing a song that really says how I feel, what I believe - and it even explains the world to myself better than I knew it.
The biggest influence? I've had several at different times - but the biggest for me was Bob Dylan, who was a guy that came along when I was twelve or thirteen and just changed all the rules about what it meant to write songs.
And I've always loved commercials. I like working out how to organically weave a brand's message into the writing process. It's like an improv show, where comics ask the audience to throw out a word and a skit is built around it.
If you've ever had your heart broken, it's like, once is enough - you can live a lifetime on that. Ya know? You can write a lot of records on one broken heart.
I write about it in the book and, you know, explain that. But that was the technicality that actually got my sentence reduced - that Alan Dershowitz used to have my sentence - it came down eventually to eight years.
And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.
I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it's more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.
Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It's the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.
You reach a point when you say to yourself, 'Do I want to keep doing this?' There are other things on my plate I want to do - I've been writing a play; I've been neglecting my standup.
I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.
