She doesn't read music and she slept through the only music theory class she ever took. Born to Russian immigrants in the fifties and obsessed with listening to the radio while growing up in Van Nuys, California, at age 7 proclaimed "I'm going to be a songwriter."

Diane Warren can be found most any day ensconced in "the cave" in Hollywood Hills, accompanied by her 18 year old parrot and "Mouse" her cat. "The cave" is her cluttered writing redoubt filled with CD's, old cassettes, tables, chairs, and a piano. During an interview with Toni Bentley she admits to never really cleaning the studio over the past 25 years, which has been the backdrop for penning over 1500 songs including Celine Dion's "Because You Loved Me," Toni Braxton's "Unbreak My Heart," and Aerosmith's "I Don't Want to Miss A Thing."  Here songs have been recorded by Elton John, Eric Clapton, Rod Stewart, Cher, Carrie Underwood, Christine Aguilera and countless others. In fact Diane was the first songwriter in the history of Billboard to claim seven hits by seven different singers, on the singles charts at one moment in time.

Asked by the Wall Street Journal's Toni Bentley how all this was possible, she gave an unsurprisingly illogical response. "I'm always doing things you're not supposed to do musically, but hey, I don't know any better." She analogizes, "For me, writing a song is like being in a really cool place in the forest figuring out how I'm going to get out." She writes a song a week.

Standing in a black t-shirt that reads "Traumatized by Mediocrity," she hears the mix-down of her recent Cher single from the new film "Burlesque," swaying with the music; one with it, lost in creative vapor. Though Warren is most famous for her ballads crafted around the theme of undying romantic love, she's essentially unattached and has been single for most of her life. "I write the most intimate songs, but I know nothing about intimacy," she reflects. Perhaps living the juxtaposition of one's imaginary self is the secret to ultimate creativity.

Each of us is searching for the ultimate expression of ourselves, yet sadly most never find it. If we had the chance to kick back and converse with the world's great artists of canvas and song, we'd likely find a fingerprint similar to the unconventional story of Diane Warren: artistic monomaniacs who live within the constricted walls of relentless creativity, coloring outside the lines of their medium's boundaries. For every "never" there's a sometimes. For every "impossible" there's a defiant maverick defying gravity.

Diane Warren returns vast amounts of her considerable fortune to animal charities. She has an especially intense love for elephants who, like her, are vegetarian. "Elephants fall in love for their whole life and when they lose their mate, they cry," she says. "They die of a broken heart."