Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can't help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don't even know why.

I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals.

It was becoming a habit-this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had. *Milkman*

For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event.

I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, from the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people.

I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.

Schools must stop being holding pens to keep energetic young people off the job market and off the streets. We stretch puberty out a long, long time.