I've always loved black culture; I don't know any other way to put it. Since I was a kid I loved music and early jazz, Sly and the Family Stone.

Hip-hop, you can't really do that when you're in your 50s.

The worst thing is to sit and whine and complain and obsess about money as if that were the only sign of your worth as a human.

Mistakes and failures are precisely your means of education. They tell you about your own inadequacies.

I often daydream about the future, thinking of the world in 100, 200 years, imagining what it looks like, feels like. I hope that my books are like ghosts that will inhabit this future.

We're selfish to some degree, that's not a criticism and it doesn't mean that we are all narcissists. But in any situation our minds naturally evolve to what's in it for me? How does this affect me? Can this benefit me? Can this harm me? Then we might move on from that and have a more altruistic point of view about things but that's almost always our initial response.

When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike. Powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less. The more you say, the more likely you are to say something foolish.