I love writing but I hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says. ' You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, giftless. I'm not your agent and I'm not your mommy, I'm a white piece of paper, you wanna dance with me?' and I really, really don't. I don't want any trouble. I'll go peaceable-like.

People who don't know anything tend to make up fake rules, the real rules being considerably more difficult to learn.

'Is it (Sports Night) a comedy or a drama?' That's generally not a question I try and answer for myself before I'm going to write something. The example I woul…

Writing anything, it sorta starts the way you'd build a castle at the beach. You're just taking your hands and you're mounting up sand.

'My stories run up and bite me in the leg- I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.'

Unlike writers or painters, we don't sit down in front of a blank canvas and say, 'How do I start? Where do I start?' We're given the springboard of the text, …

Of course, Pupkin would never have thought of considering himself on an intellectual par with Mallory Tompkins. That would have been ridiculous. Mallory Tompki…