As a writer, you don't know what the hell you're doing. You're just doing it. You hope it works out well.

When you're at the basketball court watching a game, one person may be talking about a fight he had with his wife, another is talking about the last hard-on he got, someone else is talking about the presidential election. The language and the tone and the voice - I'd love to be able to capture that spontaneity.

I'm not a fearful person, but I'm a pretty pessimistic person. So some of my best times are waiting, anticipating. That's the way it always has been with me, whether anticipating a ball game, anticipating a relationship.

There are still horrible things that go on because of the myth of race, but we don't have to succumb totally.

I can't pretend that I did one really awful thing - I took a bite out of the apple but now I'm never going to sin again.

Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.

Our thoughts, our language, are always at a distance from whatever they're trying to describe. We have other kinds of languages, like mathematics, like music, like art, but there's always that gap.