If bad taste were a felony, every writer I know would've done prison time.

Casting is sort of like looking at paintings. You don't know what you'll like, but you recognize it when you see it.

Film provides an opportunity to marry the power of ideas with the power of images.

Being a good television screenwriter requires an understanding of the way film accelerates the communication of words.

Hill Street Blues might have been the first television show that had a memory. One episode after another was part of a cumulative experience shared by the audience.

Vivid images are like a beautiful melody that speaks to you on an emotional level. It bypasses your logic centers and even your intellect and goes to a different part of the brain.

When it is perceived that a show has gone awry, the pressure is staggering, and as a writer caught in that storm, it feels like you are being attacked by jackals.

Hill Street Blues gave me an opportunity to work with an ensemble cast of people whose work I admired.

You have to give directors and cinematographers a word blueprint for visuals, but I had to learn that from experience.

I think the best work flows out of a collaborative environment.

Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience.

I'd love to promise a lifetime to you. I just don't have one to give.

Direct address has been a consistent tactic in my work, regardless of the medium that I'm working in.

As the saying goes: "If you're not part of the solution, you're a newspaper columnist."

I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it's seized on, even when it's a far from perfect fit...

I had enjoyed life in Paris, and, taking all things into consideration, enjoyed it wholesomely.

The benefits of studying abroad are almost endless.

I'm just glad that I have this huge fan.

Seeing does not always believe.

Steve Ovett, Sebastian Coe, Steve Cram - the vanguard of our cream

Wit is the rarest quality to be met with among people of education, and the most common among the uneducated.