Artists don't talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers it's stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work.

It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946 when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.

Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book If art doesn't make us better then what on earth is it for.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene and as if by magic we see a new meaning in it.

The writer when he is also an artist is someone who admits what others don't dare reveal.

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.

You know 'The Golden Girls' was a very unusual show to start on. I was young and it was a show about old people and it was a very traditional show but it was also an amazing training ground for a joke-writer. It forced me to learn those skills.

I would love to work with Paolo Nutini because he is so soulful and an amazing songwriter.

Success breeds volume and it's just amazing how many young writers artists and musicians there are in town.