The arts and a belief in the values of the civil rights movement, in the overwhelming virtue of diversity, these were our religion. My parents worshipped those ideals.

I tend to think of myself as a highly emotional writer. It's all coming out of the deepest feelings, out of dreams, out of the unconscious.

I want what we all want," said Carl. "To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world, to see if they can be embraced.

So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I'm hearing in my head. It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be.

By removing the stories from the morass of things that surround us, I'm hoping to achieve some kind of purer approach to emotional life.

Good films demand to be looked at several times in order to be observed completely.

When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.