When Rolling Stone handed me this crazy assignment to be in the studio with James Brown, they had the misapprehension that I'd written for them already just because I claimed my character had.

I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.

I never take any notes or draw charts or make elaborate diagrams, but I hold an image of the shape of a book in my head and work from that mental hologram.

I've never related to the work geek at all-it sounds much more horrible than nerd. Like a freak biting a chicken's head off in a sideshow.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.

I work on a laptop specifically so I can work in cafes and pretend I'm part of the human world.

What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?

It was only as I wrote about fear that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.

I want what we all want," said Carl. "To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world, to see if they can be embraced.

I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.

None of us have reached the peak of perfection, but it shouldn’t stop anyone from trying to make the climb.

Create and communicate absolute clarity of purpose.

We rise in glory as we sink in pride.

If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.

Everything abstract is ultimately part of the concrete. Everything inanimate finally serves the living. That is why every activity dealing in abstraction stands in ultimate service to a living whole.

Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.

Beauty is the main positive form of the aesthetic assimilation of reality, in which aesthetic ideal finds it direct expression.

The days are too short even for love; how can there be enough time for quarreling?

We always welcome when somebody says he or she is ready to work with Russia.

The apparel oft proclaims the man.