Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

Though 'Fire and Rain' is very personal for other people it resonates as a sort of commonly held experience... And that's what happens with me. I write things for personal reasons and then in some cases it... can be a shared experience.

A spy like a writer lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.

Some writers can only deal with childhood experience because it's complete. For another kind of writer life goes on and he's able to keep processing that as well.

I do write a lot from personal experience but I also embellish a bit.

I can't control what people think. I'm not trying to manipulate people's thoughts or sentiments. I write all the time. You have to experience life make observations and ask questions. It's machine-like how things are run now in hip-hop and my ambitions are different.

One nice thing about being a woman in Hollywood is that the women tend to be very close-knit. All of us writers and directors know each other and cling to each other for safety and support and it's really a completely different vibe than the men experience out here where they're all trying to murder each other.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces which represent 30% of our musical experience.

I write out of my intellectual experience.

Every secret of a writer's soul every experience of his life every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

As many political writers have pointed out commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.

I always thought we had an environmental problem but I hadn't realized how urgent it was. James Lovelock writes that by the end of this century there will be one billion people left.

Good education means learning to read write and most importantly learn how to learn so that you can be whatever you want to be when you grow up.

It's commonly said that people who've been ill in childhood and who've had an upset education never really regret that they do. It means that you don't look at the world in the way that other people do and if you were inclined to be a writer that's a help.

A writer should get as much education as possible but just going to school is not enough if it were all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.

There were all us baby boomers who had a grammar school education started to learn then went on the pill the whole thing and so there are today a lot more women writers editors producers and so a lot more women's stories. God the BBC's practically run by women.

The education that prepared me was my general education classes which I tried to avoid when I was a stupid undergraduate but which gave me the foundation of general knowledge that makes a career as a writer possible.

When I walk up on that shore in Florida I want millions of those AARP sisters and brothers to look at me and say 'I'm going to go write that novel I thought it was too late to do. I'm going to go work in Africa on that farm that those people need help at. I'm going to adopt a child. It's not too late I can still live my dreams.'

Perhaps all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels male as well as female.

The hoary joke in the literary world based on 'Dreams From My Father ' was that if things had worked out differently for Barack Obama he could have made it as a writer.

Screenplays I didn't really care about journalism travel books getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.

I feel more influenced in my own work by dreams than I do by other writers' works in a way. Or by popular culture movies - what else is there to write about than love and loss?

I don't dream songs. I'm more apt to write dreams down and then to be able to interpret them into a song. I also tend to get up and write prose in the morning from which will come songs.