When you're learning, especially to write, unless you're some incredibly gifted writer, a young Malcom Gladwell, say, you need to be imitating people. You need to be imitating how they make their work, how they structure it, how they design the pieces. It gives you chops; it gives you moves.

I wish somebody had given me the news that ideas don't just fall on your head like fairy dust. You have to treat that like a job. You have to spend hours each day, where you're just like, 'This is the part of the day when I'm looking for an idea.'

My first job on the radio was writing jokes for a Baltimore DJ called Johnny Walker, who was sort of a '70s era shock jock who all the teenage boys listened to in my school.

One of the things I learned as a young semiotics nerd was that if you have plot moving forward, no matter how banal the facts of it, simply the fact that the plot is rolling forward makes you wonder what's going to happen next, which creates suspense. So you can control peoples' attention simply by having things move forward in a story.

I wouldn't wish overnight success on anyone. You have no real friends. Everyone works endless hours at different studios, so far apart. Even on your own lot, relationships were formal and often competitive.

The primary aim of our schools should be to help children grow into happy, healthy and confident adults, equipped with the skills to achieve their goals in life and work.

Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.

I wasn't young, I wasn't pretty, and I was a black woman looking for success in a business where those attributes were certainly not in demand in the 1960s.