One of the things I really love about TV is this symbiotic relationship you can get between the writers and the actors and the characters start to come to life because you start to collaborate.

I have a love/hate relationship with just about all technology in my life. My first typewriter in particular. I had a helluva time putting new ribbon on it.

My wife Jill and I have an incredibly close working relationship and an incredibly happy married one. We met through work. I was the world's worst advertising copywriter. She had the misfortune to be my account director so from the very start she was my boss and she still is.

What I do believe is that there is always a relationship between writing and reading a constant interplay between the writer on the one hand and the reader on the other.

The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters.

If my career continues along its current arc people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor even when they don't mean to.

I've discovered just how symbiotic the relationship is between writers directors and actors. They ask the same questions and strip down texts in exactly the same way.

But I think the real tension lies in the relationship between what you might call the pursuer and his quarry whether it's the writer or the spy.

You have a strange relationship with calamity when you're a writer: you write about it as an artist you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material and that's a creepy thing to do.

I can see how a relationship with a writer would be an easy thing.

What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar is the test of their power.

It's the writers' job to make it positive. It's my job to make it real.

Since I can barely write two books a year the best solution seems to be co-author projects. My goal isn't to get another writer to clone me... it's more to produce a book that shares my vision of positive fun entertainment.

As writers and readers as sinners and citizens our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

But you cannot expect every writer to dwell on human suffering. I think my books do deal with grave issues. People who say they are too positive probably haven't read them.

Broadcasters or politicians or writers who think that they are respecting Struggle Street the battlers by dumbing things down into one-line sound bites are not respecting them they are treating them with contempt. It's our job above all in politics to tackle the big issues and to explain them.

I'm not the guy to ask about politics. I'm a gag writer.

I know many writers who first dictate passages then polish what they have dictated. I speak then I polish - occasionally I do windows.

All I knew about Ethiopia was from a few records that I like as well as what I read about the famine. But you get there and it's another world. It's filled with art and music and poetry and intellectuals and writers - all kinds of people.

I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers their trying their hand at poetry.

I don't like political poetry and I don't write it. If this question was pointing towards that I think it is missing the point of the American tradition which is always apolitical even when the poetry comes out of politically active writers.

I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could but it takes devotion and talent.

So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer I learned to write prose by reading poetry.