About life: "It is not complicated unless I make it so. It is not difficult unless I allow it to be. A second is no more than a second, a minute no more than a minute, a day no more than a day. They pass. All things and all time will pass. Don't force or fear, don't control or lose control. Don't fight and don't stop fighting. Embrace and endure. If you embrace, you will endure.

Every year, at 8:00 PM on the second Saturday of July, hundreds of people gather along a section of Los Angeles rail track to drop their pants and moon passing passenger trains.

I have a great amount of confidence and faith in my abilities to write. There are other areas of my life where I'm not as confident, and have not as much faith, but when it comes down to writing and working, I don't worry about it. I trust myself to get it right.

To say that you can't see echoes of the past in what I do would be absurd. Everything that has preceded me has affected me.

When I was a screenwriter, I was doing it for mercenary reasons.

I try to write books that are different from the books I've already written. I think one of the thing I really try to do is reinvent how a novel can be written.

I stand, walk over to him, sit down on his bed, put my arms around him, hug him. He hugs me back strong and I can feel the shame coming through his arms. I am a Criminal and he is a Judge and I am white and he is black, but at this moment none of that matters. He is a man who needs a friends and I can be his friend.