The graphic novel form really interests me and I like the freedom that format offers.

I tend not to look back. It's confusing.

I did have an offer to direct one of the Alien movies but I wasn't too excited about all the effects work.

Some say Hollywood movies that are made about boxing are just metaphors for other things, I think I've made one that's actually about boxing and not a metaphor.

Naturally we need black men to give this movie serious credibility.

I've always wanted to do a boxing movie.

Well, I'm about to do another western, a pilot for HBO this fall.

You as an audience can look at these things as films, but I remember them as social experiences.

I wouldn't not want to be a director and write as I wouldn't not to want to be a writer and direct movies.

I mean no film is beyond criticism, but I think we've made a very modest movie.

I get a great high from writing.

If everything really does get better, the way everyone claims, then happiness should be graphable. But that's crap, because better isn't quantifiable.

The imagination is a wonderful thing

Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.

My dad goes through war novels like I go through boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

I wish all men to be free. I wish the material prosperity of the already free which I feel sure the extinction of slavery would bring.

A poem may be an instance of morality, of social conditions, of psychological history; it may instance all its qualities, but never one of them alone, nor any two or three; never less than all.

Why do people think that we’re degraded when we’re examining positions of degradation, or examining the cycle of our own degradation?

In our house, all you hear is groaning.

It is the illusion of knowledge, not ignorance, that keeps one from growing.

Writing for me is largely about rewriting.