I always say three things make a writer: inspiration obviously perspiration doing the work. But the third is desperation. I'm not really fit for anything else or to have a real job. That fear drives me. The pressure has always been self inflicted.

Yet it ought to be obvious that good music generally occupies a higher plane that mere politics. Great writers can express moods through melody and capture experiences we share most powerfully - love lust longing joy rage fear triumph yearning and confusion.

I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized and I still had a daughter who I adored and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

My office walls are covered with autographs of famous writers - it's what my children call my 'dead author wall.' I have signatures from Mark Twain Earnest Hemingway Jack London Harriett Beecher Stowe Pearl Buck Charles Dickens Rudyard Kipling Alfred Lord Tennyson to name a few.

I think there are a lot more writers who are actors than you know they just don't have roles on famous TV shows that you recognize.

Being famous as a writer is like being famous in a village. It's not really any very heady fame.

I may not be the most famous songwriter in the world but you know a David Friedman song when you hear it. It took me a long time to appreciate that.

Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values some of the same techniques.

I'm not famous for my back story investigations I'm lucky that I work with good writers and it's usually in the script.