"Dukes of Hazzard" or something you could, you know that, your work is going to be made up of that - episodic television shows. Not that I got many of them, but that was where I - but actually oddly enough though, they were teaching camera terminology at the same time in this acting class, so I actually was able to understand what rack focus and whip pan and all that stuff meant.

My only obligation is to my characters. And they came from where I have been.

A writer should have this little voice inside of you saying, Tell the truth. Reveal a few secrets here.

One of the things about writing a novel is you can do it any way you want. It's your voice that's important and I see absolutely no reason why a screenplay can't be the same. It makes it a hell of a lot easier when you're the writer and the director.

As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. I demand the right to be them, I demand the right to think them and I demand the right to tell the truth as I see they are.

One of the things when you write, well the way I write, is that you are writing your scenario and there are different roads that become available that the characters could go down. Screenwriters will have a habit of putting road blocks up against some of those roads because basically they can't afford to have their characters go down there because they think they are writing a movie or trying to sell a script or something like that. I have never put that kind of imposition on my characters. Wherever they go I follow.

One of the songs that stayed in my head that I really considered a lot was an old folk song called 'John Brown' - not the abolitionist John Brown, but the one that Bob Dylan has covered and sung before. It's about a boy coming home from the Civil War, or maybe World War I even, and about his Mother seeing him all destroyed.