I am only interested in bad taste if I can enjoy a gruesome tango or watch a movie that makes me cry.

I felt the need to tell stories to understand myself.

What better model of a synthesis than a nocturnal dream? Dreams simplify, don't they?

My stories are very somber, so I think I need the comic ingredient. Besides, life has so much humor.

I can work in films as long as the story doesn't have a realistic nature. If I'm working with an allegory, a fantasy, it can be developed in synthetic terms.

I think cinema is closer to allegories than to reality. It's closer to our dreams.

If it's great stuff, the people who consume it are nourished. It's a positive force.

Your reality, isn’t restricted by this cell we live in. If you read something, if you study something, you transcend any cell you’re inside of

If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.

Teaching is a good distraction, and I am in contact with young people, which is very gratifying.

It's my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel's aesthetic facade.

stand often in the company of dreamers: they tickle your common sense & believe you can achieve things which are impossible.

I think people read travel books either because they intend to take that trip, or because they would never take that trip. In a sense, as a writer you are doing the travel for the reader.

The storm is master. Man, as a ball, is tossed twixt winds and billows.

Where your attention goes, you go.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: this triptych succinctly defines the attractiveness and superiority of Western civilization.

A death-like sleep, A gentle wafting to immortal life.

It is hard for a black man to just be himself. We spend so much time in defense of something that is indefensible because there is nothing to defend.

I feel like my home is stage acting.

If you want to be rich, think big, think differently.

Even if I screw up in my personal life, as long as I'm not destroying myself, I just think, "Okay, I screwed up." I'm not Mother Theresa.