Many people don't have an outlet for their feelings or how they can express life and not everybody in a relationship is the kind of person who wants to. But if you can write, you can find a good way to do it.

I always loved movies, but I never thought I would presume to be a screenwriter and definitely not a director. I spent a lot of time for no money trying to teach myself how to write a script. It always felt like everybody was looking the other way and sneaking that script through the system, but it did well later on video and got another chance.

I remember that, before John Lennon died, everyone was saying that Rolling Stone couldn't do good reporting anymore. But when he died, they wrote this amazing issue, as they should have about Lennon. They did that when Elvis died, too.

I write with music. I write scenes in movies that hopefully can earn the use of some songs that are powerful to me.

Great music is its own movie, already. And the challenge, as a music fan, is to keep the song as powerful as it wants to be, to not tamper with it and to somehow give it a home.

I'm impossible to forget, but I'm hard to remember.

Conception of a film starts with the music. Always. I hear the movie before I can ever write it. I would say that 80% of the time, that's the successful stuff. It's the other stuff I have to work for to get right, and sometimes it doesn't work out, but the music is always the beginning. So I'm still a music journalist.