For years I used to bore my wife over lunch with stories about funny incidents.

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.

There's a glorious sense of freedom in comedy just allowing myself to tell jokes allowing myself to interrupt myself and tell old African folk stories that I made up - or didn't - and Jamaican stories.

It was so much fun to have the freedom to wander America with no assignments. For 25 or 30 years I never had an assignment. These were all stories I wanted to do myself.

End-of-the-world stories tend to ring true. I've always been drawn to them but as I wrote my own I found surprising pleasure in creating a world that is so radically changed yet where there's so much meaning and value in every small and ordinary thing we have and take for granted: hot showers enough food friends routines.

I've published one book before and now I'm writing a book of essays and stories about life in Tokyo. And I have one book coming out in May in Germany about fitness.

If the Indian people want stories written about themselves how they want them told they are going to have to make them they're going to have to finance them. If you let Hollywood do it Hollywood is going to get it wrong most of the time.

As a novelist I tell stories and people give me money. Then financial planners tell me stories and I give them money.

Stories can conquer fear you know. They can make the heart bigger.

The first syndicating I tried was when two partners and I created a production company in 1952. We wanted to syndicate famous Bible stories and sell them for $25 a show.