I think more than writers the major influences on me have been European movies jazz and Abstract Expressionism.

Listen there are some movies that are set in stone and the writer or the director does not want to change but I've never worked on a movie including my own that didn't take advantage of a rehearsal process.

I write plays and movies I live and work at the borderline between word and image just as any cartoonist or illustrator does. I'm not a pure writer. I use words as the score for kinetic imagistic representations.

I feel I want to grow as an actress and be better. I want to progress as a singer and songwriter and produce movies and everything. So there'll be no time when I feel I've done it all.

I spent all my time on my movies worried that people were eating and that the schedule was being kept so to have experts in those areas giving me the brain space as a writer and director is huge.

I have come to understand and appreciate writers much more recently since I started working on a book last fall. Before that I thought golf writers got up every morning played a round of golf had lunch showed up for our last three holes and then went to dinner.

The process hasn't changed but the writer has developed. I still get up every morning and go to work.

I did that for 40 years or more. I never had any writer's block. I got up in the morning sat down at the typewriter - now computer - lit up a cigarette.

I get up in the morning torture a typewriter until it screams then stop.

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in you know just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing a character came sort of strolling in and I realized Oh my God I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.