Some writers can only deal with childhood experience because it's complete. For another kind of writer life goes on and he's able to keep processing that as well.

One nice thing about being a woman in Hollywood is that the women tend to be very close-knit. All of us writers and directors know each other and cling to each other for safety and support and it's really a completely different vibe than the men experience out here where they're all trying to murder each other.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Every secret of a writer's soul every experience of his life every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

As many political writers have pointed out commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.

It's commonly said that people who've been ill in childhood and who've had an upset education never really regret that they do. It means that you don't look at the world in the way that other people do and if you were inclined to be a writer that's a help.

A writer should get as much education as possible but just going to school is not enough if it were all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.

There were all us baby boomers who had a grammar school education started to learn then went on the pill the whole thing and so there are today a lot more women writers editors producers and so a lot more women's stories. God the BBC's practically run by women.

The education that prepared me was my general education classes which I tried to avoid when I was a stupid undergraduate but which gave me the foundation of general knowledge that makes a career as a writer possible.

Perhaps all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels male as well as female.