'Joy should dominate a writer's life'

 

“As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.”– Paul Rudnick 

  

Born in New Jersey on Dec. 29, 1957 Rudnick is an American playwright, novelist, screenwriter and essayist.  First catapulted to fame for his work Addams Family Values, his plays have been produced both on an off Broadway and around the world.    “Line by line, Mr. Rudnick may be the funniest writer for the stage in the United States today,” noted one New York Times reviewer.

An award-winner for numerous stage and screen works, his humorous essays appear regularly in The New Yorker.         He's also authored half-dozen novels, the most recent being Playing The Palace and Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style.

Rudnick says joy should be part of every writer’s life.  “There is only one blasphemy,” he said, “and that is the refusal to experience joy.”