Beat him, eat him and get out.

I have offices all over the place and I avoid work everywhere. I don't like to write - I like to be finished.

You don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks lying in the road.

If I can tell you the story from beginning to end in five minutes, I'm ready to start writing.

I don't write police stories, per se, but I usually write about areas that are very panoramic, like Harlem, or the Lower East Side, or a small urban city like Jersey City.

I don't need all that much - I just need to know who my characters are and what kind of jam they're going to get into, and I'll write myself out of their jam.

The first thing to look out for after your first big success are drugs and screenplays.

Writers spend three years rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet. It's enough to make you lose your mind day by day

I'd love to be a saxophonist. I don't know why, but I pretend I'm the saxophonist when I listen to music. I have about as much chance playing the sax as I do learning how to fly.

I write because I write - as anyone in the arts does. You're a painter because you feel you have no choice but to paint. You're a writer because this is what you do.

I write because I can't imagine not writing.

And her dumplings were so light they would float in the air and you'd have to catch 'em to eat 'em.

The fears of one class of men are not the measure of the rights of another.

The world has changed and it's going to keep changing, but God never changes; so we are safe when we cling to Him.

I always want to stretch myself and do something that I haven't done before.

Unfortunately, there was no Jackson Pollock of the camera.

I'm scared of boogers. If anyone ever showed me a booger I'd smash their face in.

I became the voice of a generation in a very surprising way, because many Iranians recognize themselves in it. But that is not what I wanted.

Secularism is not only in our constitution but also in our veins. We worship Mother Nature too. We believe that the world is our family.

The result was I went nowhere.

We must enlist our own snake and strike like a cobra against their vitals with an attack on Washington.