My book has a pre - civil rights setting with a post - civil rights sensibility. I believe less and less that there is something called "The Black Experience," though undoubtedly there was one once.

One thing I am learning is to slow down. Multitasking is great, but I when try to do everything at warp speed I just end up with typos and stress.

I try to find the beauty in things. On dark days, I sit in my armchair looking at clouds and I am awed at how rain is made.

I think that if you just write your characters you end up with something that people can access.

Half of what's wrong with people today is that they ain't got no place to go that makes them peaceful.

One of the things that writers worry about is finding a voice. I don't think it's a thing that you find so much as it is something that comes to you, or that presents itself.

Voice isn't fixed or unmalleable, it adapts to the characters you are creating and the story being told. I suppose in some way that's true in life - a little flexibility goes a long way.

Even if you don't feel like sitting down to write or working on that big proposal, or whatever it is, just show up anyhow and the rest will follow.

I've been writing all my life. Even though I didn't have sort of careerist aspirations as a writer, it was very much my identity.

Fiction writing is an act of imagination, lived experience is secondary in many ways, writing a novel really is all about inventing worlds and people.

All of us, writers and non-writers alike, have incredible well-springs of personal experience and history. And we also have imagination - which I think is a kind of human miracle.

Hitch your wagon to a star.

It takes great wit and interest and energy to be happy. The pursuit of happiness is a great activity. One must be open and alive. It is the greatest feat man has to accomplish.

Serbia has shown enough patience, but it has also sent a clear and strong message that the law must be respected and that no one is stronger than the state.

Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable.

Marilyn Monroe was taken advantage of by most of the men that knew her, including Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio, whom I also knew very well.

Theatre director: a person engaged by the management to conceal the fact that the players cannot act.

I am still searching for the expression of those confused sensations that we bring with us at birth.

I'm not only a romanticist but a romantic myself. I take it for granted the originality matters.

So many (too many) books are published every year, and it seems everyone is writing a book. Perhaps we should all be reading more and writing less!

You have to treat Hollywood like it's your boyfriend - he's there all the time.