Cold start is a hard start.

The scholar's greatest weakness: calling procrastination research.

Come to a book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it, and draw your own map.... A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it.

A library card is good to have, you can never have too much ID.

I thought it was great fun to scare people. I also knew it was socially acceptable because there were a lot of horror movies out there.

I've always thought it would be fun to update "Hansel and Gretel." I'd have these white parents in the suburbs with an income of fifty or sixty thousand dollars. Daddy loses his job, and the wicked stepmother says, "We could get along, we could keep our Mastercharge, if you'd just get rid of those shitty kids." Finally the father hires a limo and tells the driver, "Drop 'em off on Lenox Avenue in Harlem at two in the morning." These two little white kids land there. They're menaced. And this supposedly nice black lady says, "Would you like some candy?"

My mother was a reader, and she read to us. She read us Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when I was six and my brother was eight; I never forgot it.