I was writing an earnest novel about cruises in the Caribbean and I just started writing 'Bridget Jones' to get some money to finance this earnest work and then I chucked it out.

I'm looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

I fear dying in the middle of a book. It would be so annoying to write 80 000 words and not get to the end. I'm phobic about it. So when I'm writing a book I leave messages all over the house for people to know how the story ends and then someone can finish it for me.

The vehemence with which certain critics have chosen not simply to criticize what I've written but to challenge my writing this story at all speaks of what the book is about: fear of disapproval.

I never discuss a novel while I'm writing it for fear that talking about it will diminish my desire to write it.

Writing is a form of therapy sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write compose or paint can manage to escape the madness melancholia the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.

I heard so many stories from Gaomi's peasants that I had an irrepressible urge to write them down. Today Gaomi's peasants know that they have become famous around the world through my writings but I think they are a little puzzled by this.

I don't want to be famous per se but I want to write books for as long as I can. And I plan on writing a lot.

Oh yeah I was one of the first guys writing comic books I wrote Captain America with guys like Stan Lee who became famous later on with Marvel Comics.

Don't worry about writing a book or getting famous or making money. Just lead an interesting life.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

I have a great job writing for 'The Office ' but really all television writers do is dream of one day writing movies. I'll put it this way: At the Oscars the most famous person in the room is like Angelina Jolie. At the Emmys the huge exciting celebrity is Bethenny Frankel. You get what I mean.

I do a lot of writing about my family.

If I'm not writing well I'm not happy. If I'm not spending enough time with my family I'm not happy. If I'm not connecting to friends or if I don't work out enough... You get the point. Everything has to be balanced. Nothing should be an extreme.

Frankly I'm fairly boring or fairly busy. Between writing and family I have little time for anything else.

As a novelist I mined my history my family and my memory but in a very specific way. Writing fiction I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

People had this image of the Jacksons as the perfect American family and I destroyed that image. But what people have to understand is writing that book was very healing for me.