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.

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

To all of you who have made my being alive so wonderful, so exciting and so full, my thanks and all my love.

The alienation of man thus appeared as the fundamental evil of capitalist society.

Damn, he was good. I'd been professionally sullied without a single item of clothing removed.

Women! I have no idea. I don't know anything about women at all. They're a complete mystery to me.

When you love someone, you shouldn't feel that they should love in return. You have to give people freedom.

No one on this earth attains enlightenment anymore without an enlightened master as a guide, unless that person was enlightened in many previous incarnations.

Real men stay faithful. They don't have time to look for other women because they're too busy looking for new ways to love their own.

Be precise in the use of words and expect precision from others

There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.

Until she met the exploding statue, Annabeth thought she was prepared for anything.