Nashville is one of the greatest places for the best songwriters in the world. It's been fantastic to live there and to raise our family there. It's a great town.

It's not an accident that both my sister and I are writers. Our parents created an accidental Petri dish. My family has great storytellers and I grew up in a very funny conversational house and didn't have television. This small family farm was a bubble world that didn't have much to do with reality.

In times when religious or political faith or hope predominates the writer functions totally in unison with society and expresses society's feelings beliefs and hopes in perfect harmony.

I just can't say enough about the actors having faith and trust in the writers and the writers having faith and trust in the actors.

Writers now are putting total faith in designers at Apple and Amazon. It's almost like a race-car driver having no input into how cars are designed.

In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write.

But whatever my failure I have this thing to remember - that I was a pioneer in my profession just as my grandfathers were in theirs in that I was the first man in this section to earn his living as a writer.

I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.

The most important training though is to experience life as a writer questioning everything inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that all the other things will come if you don't there's no hope for you.

But because we've all been readers we know what the experience is like and we hope that what certain writers have given to us we will give to someone.

A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.

In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

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.