Art isn't and shouldn't be responsible. If it is, it isn't functioning as art.

This is what noir is, what it can be when it stops playing nice--blunt force drama stripped down to the bone, then made to dance across the page.

Craft can get you through ninety percent of a piece, but it's art that carries you at the end.

Life's so much easier when you're not always maintaining two worlds: the one formed of lies, which feels real, and the one you live in, which often feels like lies. So easy to get them confused.

The truth is, poverty's the environment for alcoholism, and the reservations aren't rich. Maybe cleaning people up in fiction is just as dangerous as presenting them unfiltered.

Writing, of course, it's not all in your head. Not talking about the 'manual' act of typing here either, but that, when your fiction's really working, your whole body's involved, and then some.

What the readers want is a good story, and what the writers always want to luck into, it's a good story.

Football's another sport I absolutely despise. Along with baseball. Really, for me, basketball's the only real sport, the only one that matters.

I do love the challenge of screenplays. They're so difficult, such an alien form. It makes them endlessly fascinating. Something I can't keep my fingers out of.

This is form and content and diction and tone and imagination all looking up at the exact same moment: When Molly Tanzer claps once at the front of the classroom.

Could feel the reservation wheeling around him, changing shape so that he nearly had to vomit, or hold his arms to his head and scream against it all.

In scientific thinking are always present elements of poetry. Science and music requires a thought homogeneous.

It was a dictum of his that the soul's energy thrives when the body's desires are feeblest.

His silent, stony face was only inches away now. He was so near, so terribly near – and then he moved to close the last bit of distance.

Intellectual freedom is the only guarantee of a scientific - democratic approach to politics, economic development, and culture.

I use all of my bullets and my guns like I'm supposed to use them.

You heard of hell, well I was sent from it.

My reasoning, if one can call it that, was inflamed by the scatter shot passions of youth and a literary diet overly rich in the works of Nietzshe, Kerouac, and John Menlove Edwards.

Extremely religious, legalistic people have a criticism or judgment about everyone and everything. They just have a way of bringing people down with what they say.

When you listen to people who have accomplished so much, the one thing they always say is, "I didn't let anybody stop me." I really, really, steadfastly believe that.

Generally, I tend to despise human behavior rather than human creatures.