It may sound strange, but when you're a kid and you're in that environment, for some reason for a long time you think, when the doors are closed in other houses, this is what it's like everywhere. And then at some point you begin to realize that isn't true, and books were really the educational system that showed me that there were many better and different ways to live a life.

I'm either a mutant or a cripple, and I refuse to be a cripple. People pity cripples, but they're afraid of mutants [...] Fear implies respect.

Southerners have many fine qualities, charm and civility among them, and a sense of the tragic.

I'll sit in the park and feed the pigeons for a while.' We don't have pigeons.' Then I'll feed the pterodactyls.

I have to admit that when I watch a movie in which there is no moral context for the violence - I find that offensive. I think that's potentially damaging to society.

...at it's best fiction is medicine.

Dare we linger, dare we skate? Dare we laugh or celebrate, knowing we may strain the ice? Preserve the ice at any price?