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.

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.

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.

You can't take a character anywhere they don't expect the character to go. But within those confines is where creativity lies

Man kept control over the machines he created, I wish God would have done the same with the man he created.

The state of man is inconstancy, ennui, anxiety.

I need to learn to be more assertive.

I grew up watching classic animation, and I have always felt that the roots of animation is in fantasy and taking it in places that you can't go, any other way.

I can't rhyme for little green apples. What I can do is scan and make patterns.

Nothing exists but atoms and the void.

Men are apt to be much more influenced by words than by the actual facts of the surrounding reality

The pharmaceutical industry isn't the only place where there's waste and inefficiency and profiteering. That happens in much of the rest of the health care industry.

One of the first movies I ever saw was 'Batman,' based on the TV series with Adam West and Burt Ward.

When we learn to say a deep, passionate yes to the things that really matter, then peace begins to settle onto our lives like golden sunlight sifting to a forest floor.