You're not going to have the police force representing the black and brown community, if they've spent the last 30 years busting every son and daughter and father and mother for every piddling drug offense that they've ever done, thus creating a mistrust in the community. But at the same time, you should be able to talk about abuses of power, and you should be able to talk about police brutality and what, in some cases, is as far as I'm concerned, outright murder and outright loss of justice without the police organization targeting you in the way that they have done me.

One of the things when you write, well the way I write, is that you are writing your scenario and there are different roads that become available that the characters could go down. Screenwriters will have a habit of putting road blocks up against some of those roads because basically they can't afford to have their characters go down there because they think they are writing a movie or trying to sell a script or something like that. I have never put that kind of imposition on my characters. Wherever they go I follow.

The easiest way to kill a cult is to make that cult accessible.

I'm not superstitious in my normal daily life but I get that way about writing, even though I know it's all bullshit. But I began that way and so, that's the way it is. My ritual is I never use a typewriter or computer. I just write it all by hand. It's a ceremony. I go to a stationary store and buy a notebook and then fill it up.

I'm very happy with the way I write. I think I do it good. But I've never really considered myself a writer.

Suddenly, Westerns, which were our action films and what the working man went to see to blow off steam and have a good time, became boring to most people growing up from the Eighties on, because they're kind of pastoral.

When you start writing, you have your characters on a metaphorical paved road, and as they go down it, all these other roads become available that they can go down. And a lot of writers have roadblocks in front of those roads: they won’t allow their characters to go down those roads... I’ve never put any roadblocks on any of these paths. My characters can go wherever they would naturally go, and I’ll follow them.