Before I'd written movies I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that.

Another thing that's quite different in writing a book as a practicing newspaperman is that if you look at what you've written the next morning and you think you didn't get it quite right you can fix it.

Some of those more out-there jokes were written in the wee hours of the morning. Somehow they remained funny the next day.

He had written my mother once that he wanted her to be the first thing he saw every morning and the last thing he ever saw. And that's how it turned out.

I think the worst and most insidious procrastination for me is research. I will be looking for some bit of fact or figure to include in the novel and before I know I've wasted an entire morning delving into that subject matter without a word written.

There was a chance for me to write one song for the section where Elvis sat in his black leather outfit and sang the old hits. At eight oclock the next morning I had written Memories.

After my mom died there was so much written about her fashion and her style and all that and I felt that one of the most important parts of her was missing her real intellectual curiosity.

Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men and I will find an excuse in them to hang him.

I have written two medical novels. I have never studied medicine never seen an operation.

You may not be able to read a doctor's handwriting and prescription but you'll notice his bills are neatly typewritten.