I'm an affluent screenwriter and all that - I'm a known screenwriter, but I'm not in the fraternity of the very, very major people. I would say a guy like Ernie Lehman, William Goldman, and a few others are quite a cut above.

Most shows, buying shows, have a standard fee for the first shot of the writer and if you have a very militant agent, I suppose he might jack it up four percent or something. But in essence, you sell for what is the going rate.

I find dictating in the mass media particularly good because you're writing for voice anyway; you're writing for people to say a line and, consequently, saying a line through a machine is quite a valid test for the validity of what you're saying.

You could do much more in movies than you could on TV, and even movies were heavily censored. But in television, the areas of timorousness were fairly laid out. Race relations. Sex. Politics. There was a whole conglomeration of taboo themes. And even to date, though television has become a much freer medium, it's still far less free, far less creatively untrammeled than are the movies. They're infinitely more adult in that respect.

Good evening, and welcome to a private showing of three paintings, displayed here for the first time. Each is a collectors' item in its own way - not because of any special artistic quality, but because each captures on a canvas, and suspends in time and space, a frozen moment of a nightmare.

You know, writer can write about the Foreign Legion without ever having been in the Foreign Legion, but that doesn't necessarily mean that what he's written doesn't necessarily reflect the nature of him as an individual - or her. Using the male gender because it's me speaking. I don't mean to put down the female.

The tendency when you dictate is to overwrite, because you're not counting pages, you don't really know what the hell the page count is.