It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want.

I'd excluded New York from my writing, and then I came back and I fell in love with it all over again... The energy comes from an absence, that yearning for New York when you are not there.

Teenage life - possibly adult life too is all about what you want and can’t have. And then about what you receive and misuse.

There's something about the rhythms of language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies.

When people call something "original," 9 out of 10 times they just don't know the references or original sources involved.

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

When Rolling Stone handed me this crazy assignment to be in the studio with James Brown, they had the misapprehension that I'd written for them already just because I claimed my character had.