John Brown first swam into my vision in the 1960s when I was a political activist in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement at Chapel Hill, where I went to university.

One of the things I have tried to do with this book and with all of them really is avoid that simple, easy, reductionist view of motivation and to show we do things for a complex net of reasons, a real braid of reasons.

I began as a boy with artistic talent... as a visual artist... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature.

Luck can't last a lifetime unless you die young.

There is a wonderful intelligence to the unconscious. It’s always smarter than we are.

A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.

Nobody does anything for one reason.