I have a life, I have a wife. I have an adult son who I'm very close to, and friends. I go hiking almost every day, four to six miles. In the summer, I'm out surfing or swimming. I think that real, human relationships with people mostly balance dark places in my work.

That sounds like Anthony Soprano. He has a point. I've said it before: if you're black and you sell dope, you end up in the big house; if you're white and you sell a large amount of dope, you end up visiting the White House. So it's a matter of race and it's a matter of scale, frankly.

How much more money do we have to waste, how many more families have to be destroyed, how many more people have to be killed before you summon the courage to tell the truth to the American people?

I have to remind the people who put down East Coast surfing that Kelly Slater is from Florida.

Smart people sometimes get stupid, but stupid people never get smart.

A lot of times, writers are told write as big as you can, and that's not untrue. But at times I think it's better to write as small as you can, to start scenes with little personal details or people who are doing average every day human things. That, to me, lets the average reader into that person's life. "Yeah I eat breakfast. I take a shower."

There are various kinds of savagery: emotional, spiritual, economic, and cultural savagery.