Science fiction writers I am sorry to say really do not know anything. We can't talk about science because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial and usually our fiction is dreadful.

It's definitely true that there are a lot of the devices we used on 'Star Trek ' that came out the imagination of the writers and the creators that are actually in the world today.

The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.

Someone once said that history has more imagination than all the scenario writers in the Pentagon and we have a lot of scenario writers here. No one ever wrote a scenario for commercial airliners crashing into the World Trade Center.

But it also became the experience or was the experience of the writers who were attracted to this kind of humor. They're all men or women who come from the same kind of experience in their own lives.

Some major writers have a huge impact like Ayn Rand who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction but it really isn't fiction at all.

Feature-length film comedy is harder to pull off than the episodic sitcom - it doesn't have the same factory machinery up and running teams of writers putting familiar characters through permutations - but that doesn't explain the widening quality gap that makes movie humor look like a genetic defective.

The nation that complacently and fearfully allows its artists and writers to become suspected rather than respected is no longer regarded as a nation possessed with humor or depth.

Ironically Latin American countries in their instability give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed.

If you're a misanthrope you stay at home. There are certain writers who really don't like other people. I'm not like that I don't think.