Comics? Honestly, that's more a matter of nostalgia for me. I think most of that energy has gone to my love of literature, and my love of film...

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.

Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan.... Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self.

I have a horror of silence while I'm writing. It's like the universe is howling at me if I don't have it.

You can't be deep without a surface

I've discovered that like every writer, I'm helpless MYSELF - and that means I find myself unconsciously or semi-consciously repeating motifs and themes and even using certain words or images recurrently in my work, no matter how much I think I'm starting fresh. But I've always admired artists who made a specific sport of trying to visit different kinds of genres or mediums or modes - not just 'western' or 'detective', but comedy/tragedy, epic and miniature, traditional/experimental.

Some people have things written all over their faces; the big guy had a couple of words misspelled in crayon on his.