Talent is cheap. What matters is discipline.

I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that's the job of art.

One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.

I see a lot of marriages crash and burn around me and my wife. I've always been curious about how hard it is to love well and be loved.

Fear is a ghost; embrace your fear, and all you’ll see in your arms is yourself.

As a matter of writing philosophy, if there is one, I try not to ever plot a story. I try to write it from the character's point of view and see where it goes.

I've learned over the years that the writing is smarter and far larger than the writer and his or her own desires for it.

I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.

Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.

I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?

People in powerful positions come under scrutiny, and sometimes they get in trouble for things that their underlings did.

I got shot in the head by my own guys in my foxhole. And they didn't even give me an honorable death.

Where are you? Here What time is it? Now What are you? This moment.

The yellow star? Oh well, what of it? You dont die of it.

The world was not wheeling anymore. It was just very clear and bright and inclined to blur at the edges.

When you're writing a novel, you're still telling a story. But you're telling it very differently. It's a craft like anything else.

Oh, my God, my thirties blew! Forties are great.

I was always a singer. But I was always focused on being an actor as my trade. Music I do just for me. The movie business is very difficult but the music business is just impossible.

There is some lack either of sense or of character in one who becomes involved in difficulties with the worthless or the vicious.

I left my marriage knowing I'd have to work. I have.