I was very happy sitting alone at a dining room table writing a script.

The daily act of writing remains as demanding and maddening as it was before and the pleasure you get from writing - rare but profound - remains at the true heart of the enterprise. On their best days writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers all alone in their studios with no one watching.

If I was writing songs just for me I'd only play them in my living room alone.

I'm very shy really. I spend a lot of time in my room alone reading or writing or watching television.

Early on if I was alone two three nights in a row I'd start writing poems about suicide.

Listen in England people are already writing their memoirs at the age of 23.

One already feels like an anachronism writing novels in the age of what-ever-this-is-the-age-of but touring to promote them feels doubly anachronistic. The marketplace is showing an increasing intolerance for the time-honored practice of printing information on paper and shipping it around the country.

I am 54 and age is slowly writing itself on my face.

I started writing when I had three kids under the age of 4. I used to write every ten minutes I got to sit in front of a computer. Now when I have more time I function the same way: if it's writing time I write.

I was always concerned with writing to my age at a particular moment. That was the way I would keep faith with the audience that supported me as I went along.

I basically get stereotyped a lot in terms of being a girl and writing 'chick' music for teenage girls or something. I think if anything the press kind of because of my gender and my age tends to kind of relegate my work to this sort of special-interest group. It's part of the cultural dynamic I guess.