I love playing with form. I love playing with sounds... I love music, and I love writing that has a musicality to it.
There is a kind of mysticism to writing.
I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.
Writing in the first person, you immediately open yourself up to the idea that there's a connection between you and the narrator.
It wasn't my natural inclination to get into writing protest songs.
I've been pretty well treated by the critics, but the critics who didn't like my comedies hated them with an unbridled passion, and then I would see these same people writing very respectfully about ordinary naturalistic plays.
You reach a point when you say to yourself, 'Do I want to keep doing this?' There are other things on my plate I want to do - I've been writing a play; I've been neglecting my standup.
When I'm writing, I don't feel neurotic. So it's better for the family if I'm working.
I gave up the notion of writing the life of Joan of Arc, as I found that there was absolutely no new material to be gleaned on her history - in fact, she had been thrashed out.
Before I ever begin writing a new story, I have to sketch my characters out on paper. It's part of my process of understanding who they are.
I'm always trying out new stuff onstage. That's where I do all my writing.
Scarcely a day goes by without some claim that new technologies are fast writing newsprint's obituary.
Writing is still my main career, but I would love, for instance, to serve in the New York State Assembly.
When I first started, everything happened at once. I became religious, my musical career took off, I got married, I had kids, and all that happened within the course of a year. I had an excitement about this newly found faith, and so I was writing about that in a very evident kind of way.
That's a paradox I've noticed, too: The news business held little romance for me, yet writing about it somehow stirred my affections.
I was an English major in college, took a ton of creative writing courses, and was a newspaper reporter for 10 years.
Before I ever heard about '60 Minutes,' I had been a writer, a columnist for 'Life' magazine and for 'Newsweek' - that was about as high as you could get in column writing. I care about my writing. I'm not a quack-quack TV journalist.
The number of mystery and horror writers I've met who are just the sanest and the nicest people... it's crazy. Maybe it's because the writing gets something out of the system?
Early on, if I was alone two three nights in a row, I'd start writing poems about suicide.
