Strangely enough, for many many years I didn't talk about my childhood and then when I did I got a ton of mail - literally within a year I got a couple of thousand letters from people who'd had a worse childhood, a similar childhood, a less-bad childhood, and the question that was most often posed to me in those letters was: how did you get past the trauma of being raised by a violent alcoholic?

When tempest tossed, embrace chaos

I work on one page, revising and polishing until I can't make it better, then move on to the next. Some pages might get 20 or more drafts before I move on.

One of the things I like enormously about Bob Weinstein is that that he's the only studio head I have ever known who will change his mind and say he was wrong.

Perseverance is impossible if we don't permit ourselves to hope.

If I waited until I felt creative, I would never have had a career. I long ago learned that a day that starts out badly, when nothing comes out on the page or comes out wrong, can suddenly turn into a good day a few hours later, when suddenly everything starts to click. The brain can be cajoled into being creative.

In my personal life, I'm a comic novel. But then, so are we all, because we're human beings.