But on the other hand, I don't actively seek out stories or hunt them down.

So the same cultural and political issues that divided us in 1968 are still dividing us.

A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.

Storytelling is an ancient and honorable act. An essential role to play in the community or tribe. It's one that I embrace wholeheartedly and have been fortunate enough to be rewarded for.

Motivations are too tangled and complex.

And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.

The United States particularly abandoned Liberia after the end of the Cold War.

I much prefer working with kids whose life could be completely upended by a reading of a book over a weekend. You give them a book to read - they go home and come back a changed person. And that is so much more interesting and exciting.

Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.

The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.

Nobody does anything for one reason.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.

Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life.

Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.

But on the other hand, I don't actively seek out stories or hunt them down.

I began as a boy with artistic talent... as a visual artist... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature.

It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.

But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.

First of all it's usually women who run these higher primate sanctuaries, rarely men. They are white. They come from privileged backgrounds. They are educated.

For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by the average dentist or accountant.

I don't want it to be all that self-conscious or artificial, but it really grows out of my having invented myself as a listener so that I could hear her voice.

One of the things I have tried to do with this book and with all of them really is avoid that simple, easy, reductionist view of motivation and to show we do things for a complex net of reasons, a real braid of reasons.

If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.

What I am finding now is that my audience is getting younger as I get older, which is a very good thing as you know - you don't want them to get older as you get older.

John Brown first swam into my vision in the 1960s when I was a political activist in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement at Chapel Hill, where I went to university.

And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.

The 60s passed and faded and I grew older, and in 1987 bought a house in upstate New York, and it turned out that John Brown was buried down the road from my house and that he had lived there longer than anywhere else and his house was still standing.

I never go to funerals. To me a person is dead when he breathes for the last time. After that, your memories should be personal.

For me, the most attractive thing in a man is the ability to make me laugh.

I can look back at things I've done and said and worn and be completely humiliated by them, but I can never say it wasn't me. I feel really honored to say that.

Even if I wore a hat and a wig, you can always tell it's me.

We know what molecules are needed to sense light - what turns that signal that detects light into an electrical signal. We know how smells are detected. But we have a vast number of senses for which we know what the signal is, but we don't know what the receiver is.

Fear less, hope more; eat less, chew more; whine less, breath more; talk less, say more; hate less, love more; and all good things shall be yours.

I'm going to go to school. It doesn't matter what the outcome is as long as I did it. I can say I did it.

No, in 1968 I still wanted to be a Pop Star, and be about the music. Now, I want to be just about the music.

Willie Wells, Ray Dandridge, Leon Day, Buck Leonard, Quincy Troupe, Satchel Paige - earlier than when he was called up - Oscar Charleston and Josh Gibson. You see what kind of talent we had, and guys in the majors knew it too.

I am insanely superstitious. All the woman in my family are, beginning with my grandmother, who would leave red ribbons under the beds and taught us how to find four-leaf clovers.

I think it no accident that most of those emigrating to America in the 19th century identified with the Democratic Party. We are a heterogeneous party made up of Americans of diverse backgrounds.

Life always offers us a second chance. It's called tomorrow. So don't give up against adverse circumstances and keep fighting.

The characters are the result of two things-first, we elaborate them into fairly well-defined people through their dialogue, then they happen all over again, when the actor interprets them.

No gold glitters like that which is our own.

The proper means of increasing the love we bear our native country is to reside some time in a foreign one.

The frontiers we broke into in the '60s are still largely unexplored.

People make music to get a reaction. Music is communication.

For my first three books the setting (or place if you will) has always been a given - N.J. and the Dominican Republic and some N.Y.C. - so from one perspective you could say that the place in my work always comes first.

I don't know about you, but I love going on trips - especially with my family.

I went to Carnegie Mellon.

I work for one man. His name is Donald Trump. He has told me one thing: 'Secure the border.'