Boys like it when you talk to them as if they were grown men—at least he always did when he was a kid—because they pretend that’s what they are anyhow, grown-up men, and they do it for their entire lives.

First of all it's usually women who run these higher primate sanctuaries, rarely men. They are white. They come from privileged backgrounds. They are educated.

We know that people we love are both good and bad, but we expect strangers to be one or the other.

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.

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

One hates a person for the same reason one loves him

Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.