Motivations are too tangled and complex.

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 was appointed Poet Laureate. It came totally out of the blue because most Poet Laureates had been considerably older than I. It was not something that I even had begun to dream about!

I was never so directly inspired by fashion. It always came from somewhere else.

Sir one more comment like that and I will strangle you with my microphone wire!

I think I'm drawn to characters with complexity or who are under duress in some way and have some conflict going on.

There are just certain realities about our world and I just happen to be creative within it.

We usually use that mostly on the weekends because we have access to the range during the week. But I can tell you a number of times they have had a training holiday at Fort Benning, so nobody trains, and to drag him in is like pulling teeth.

I would like to be a terrorist for music education - to make a complete reform, all over the world.

Paternalistic regulations often prohibit women from holding jobs in certain industries: In the Russian Federation, women cannot drive trucks in the agriculture sector; in Belarus, they cannot be carpenters; in Kazakhstan, they cannot be welders.

Politics is a rough and tumble business. It's not for the faint-hearted. I've got bruises and cuts from being in the political arena. But by and large, I understand how to navigate the process.

One thing I think is that comics are really good at expressing emotion. I think there's a way that comics characters can be drawn not-realistically, but the emotional reality is still very sincere. So you can have these exaggerations that express inner emotion through physical appearance.

There's a huge part of me that's thinking about perfection. I have to fight that urge, to try to live in the moment, reach for something that I might be hearing, and not second-guess myself.

Morning is a wonderful blessing either sunny or stormy. It stands for hope giving us another start of what we call life.

I will say that there are genuine and serious concerns about what Hillary Clinton did before the Benghazi attacks, during them, and after them. I think her extremely careless handling of classified information, to use FBI Director Jim Comey's term, disqualifies her from being president.

Happiness is knowing and appreciating what you've got. I am very, very, very grateful for what, to me, is dead easy.

Eat less, taste more.

You may keep Turkey on the map of Europe, you may call the country by the name of Turkey if you like, but do not think you can keep up the Mahommedan rule in the country.

I actually feel, when I get to about page 200, that it's going to be a book after all! It never gets easier - when you conquer one problem, another one rises up to take its place.

I think sometimes we rush through countries, ticking off the attractions, but that's missing the point.

Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.

Tis a month before the month of May, And the spring comes slowly up this way.

Acting is about enhancing your life, not representing something that's missing.