And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.

A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.

If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.

John Brown first swam into my vision in the 1960s when I was a political activist in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement at Chapel Hill, where I went to university.

Like Neanderthals, men prefer to hunt alone or, if in a pack, at the head of it. Women, whether in the field or in a campfire, are collaborative, and when they hunt...they work together.

Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.

Loyalty is weird, it kicks in when you dont expect it and the people who deserve loyalty least seem to get it the most.

For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by the average dentist or accountant.

Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.

Let the truth take care of itself, I decided. It's done all right on its own so far.

The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.

Love is deserved, not desired.

We children of schizophrenics are the great secret keepers, the ones who don't want you to think that anything is wrong.

I'm delighted that the future is unsure. That's the way it should be.

America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.

My mother and I parting company at four years old is a recurring theme; although it's not symbolically necessarily present, it's present in all my relationships.

I try my hardest to push the point that I am a feminist.

Conversely, the most powerful thing an actor can say is "no." If something is presented and it's a stereotypical role or something, you can say no to that, and that's very powerful.

The loneliness of writing is that you baffle your friends and change the lives of strangers.

Power, carried to extremes, is always liable to reaction.

I've been an athlete that's sort of in advance; always thinking. After basketball I'd love to have my own radio show, my own TV show.