You can use your means in a good and bad way. In German-speaking art we had such a bad experience with the Third Reich when stories and images were used to tell lies. After the war literature was careful not to do the same which is why writers began to reflect on the stories they told and to make readers part of their texts. I do the same.

I'm a method writer. In order to write about the emotion I have to experience it. I get physically tired and exhausted devoting hours and hours and hours to it.

The fact that I am a writer comes from the experience of being cut away from my roots and living in Venezuela where I couldn't find a place for myself for years and years.

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

Though 'Fire and Rain' is very personal for other people it resonates as a sort of commonly held experience... And that's what happens with me. I write things for personal reasons and then in some cases it... can be a shared experience.

A spy like a writer lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.

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.

I do write a lot from personal experience but I also embellish a bit.

I can't control what people think. I'm not trying to manipulate people's thoughts or sentiments. I write all the time. You have to experience life make observations and ask questions. It's machine-like how things are run now in hip-hop and my ambitions are different.

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.