It used to be that you had to make female TV characters perfect so no one would be offended by your 'portrayal' of women. Even when I started out on 'The Office' eight years ago we could write our male characters funny and flawed but not the women. And now thankfully it's completely different.

The trick is always to write in pairs because if at least two people find it funny you've immediately halved the odds of it not being funny.

Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.

I wanted to be that quirky girl who writes funny songs that still have meaning.

I thought 'Borat' was a breakthrough comedy because it was really funny. It wasn't some studio-produced script with 14 writers.

God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny.

A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead.

Ray Bradbury is for many reasons the most influential writer in my life. Throughout our long friendship Ray supplied not only his terrific stories but a grand model of what a writer could be should be and yet rarely is: brilliant and charming and accessible willing to tolerate and to teach happy to inspire but also to be inspired.

When Ted Williams was here inducted into the Hall of Fame 37 years ago he said he must have earned it because he didn't win it because of his friendship with the writers. I guess in that way I'm proud to be in this company that way.

People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book' but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me because in my view fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.

The humor is essentially dark for a cartoon and sophisticated. But at the same time being a cartoon gives the writers more freedom than in a normal sitcom. It always pushes the line that despite human failings the Simpsons are really decent people.

I was inspired to write this book by those who are sceptical of the power of freedom to change the world.

Life is a very orderly thing but in fiction there is a huge liberation and freedom. I can do what I like. There's nothing that says I can't write a page of full stops. There is no 'should' involved although you wouldn't know that from literary reviews and critics.

I have more freedom when I write fiction but my memoirs have had a much stronger impact on my readers. Somehow the 'message ' even if I am not even aware that there is one is conveyed better in this form.

Those who write the editorials and those who write the columns they simply are unaccountable. They're free to impose their cultural politics in the name of freedom of the press.

I will never understand people who think that the way to show their righteous opposition to sexual freedom is to write letters full of filthy words.

A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom.

But I don't think any arranger should ever write a drum part for a drummer because if a drummer can't create his own Interpretation of the chart and he plays everything that's written he becomes mechanical he has no freedom.

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

To become self-aware people must be allowed to hear a plurality of opinions and then make up their own minds. They must be allowed to say write and publish whatever they want. Freedom of expression is the most basic but fundamental right. Without it human beings are reduced to automatons.

Who is more to be pitied a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

When people talk of the freedom of writing speaking or thinking I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.

I live in America. I have the right to write whatever I want. And it's equaled by another right just as powerful: the right not to read it. Freedom of speech includes the freedom to offend people.