The kind of event on a conveyor belt that causes a fire occurs in a variety of industrial environments, not uniquely in coal environments.

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.

Rebellion is when you look society in the face and say I understand who you want me to be, but I’m going to show you who I actually am.

Age does not protect you from love but love to some extent protects you from age.

Those against politics are in favor of the politics inflicted upon them.

I was a Labour Party man but I found myself to the left of the Labour party in Nelson, militant as that was. I came to London and in a few months I was a Trotskyist.

The character is a piece of fiction. You are yourself, however, and that makes you interesting, because you're alive and you're a human being.

This marketplace where people can buy insurance who don't have it today, a competitive marketplace - that's an idea that both sides embrace.

It's you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I'd looked at so long that I'd ceased to see them.

Concrete is heavy; iron is hard - but the grass will prevail.

The Church in the colonies is the white people's Church, the foreigner's Church. She does not call the native to God's ways but to the ways of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor.

Giving is a way of having what you need.