He told me about a time that another new, young writer on a TV show with him complained, “I don’t like it that we write this stuff, and then they change it. I don’t like that they change my words before they go on the air.” Conan replied, “Oh, you know what’s interesting? You know whose work was never changed—they never touched it, and she had complete control of everything she wrote? Emily Dickinson. She wrote it in her attic, and then she died. Probably coughed up blood and keeled over and that was it. And they found [her work] later on, and they never changed a word.”
