The whole notion of owning a person is so ludicrous, there's plenty of room to make fun.

I think heroes who are not flawed are not believable.

I used to walk through the Old Times Square fearing for my life. Now I wouldn't be caught dead there.

When the great jazz and blues clubs closed - joints where the cash register rang loudly and there wasn't ESPN on TV over the bandstand, and people smoked cigarettes and drank whiskey and hollered 'Play on!' - When those places closed, I was pretty much done.

A daily dose of Nietzsche goes a long way.

Fiction makes your dreams come true, and, as a writer, fiction allows you to delve into the area of miracles.

Some writers like to go around talking about what they do all the time. I don't.

I hate to sound blase about it, but literary status is not important to me. Being happy is important to me.

Being a best-selling author doesn't make you a millionaire. It's not like Stephen King.

John Brown was the abolitionist to end all abolitionists. People thought he was crazy. He was like John Coltrane playing free jazz, exhausting all possibilities in his approach to harmony and improvisation.

I have cousins in North Carolina who talk in that old Southern style of 'yakking,' if you will. All the black men in my life when I was a boy talked that way, and I love that kind of talk.

I write stories that are already in the air, and I think it's important to have the correct listening device to tune in to that frequency.

I like stories where normal people are in abnormal situations, and that's what appeals to me about history.

The starting point of all great jazz has got to be format, a language that you can work within that, in some ways, is much tighter than the blues or even gospel. It's all working towards the same destination - the difference being that Miles Davis flew there, and I'm still taking the subway.

We're learning a tremendous amount of propaganda from television and the Internet.

As far as making a living, if plumbing earned more, I'd probably do it. At least you can leave the job at home once the tools are put away. A writer works in his mind 24/7.

Everybody knew James Brown. Every musician dreamed of being in his band.

Spike Lee listens a lot. He's one of the quietest creative people I've ever met.

I'm trying to get Americans to see that we're all pretty much the same. I believe it; I was taught God doesn't have a color. I want to better the planet a little bit.

All of us want to be Superman when we grow up, fighting for truth and justice. That's part of what drives me as a writer.

I don't live for my work. My life is my life. That's more important, and I think that helps my work.

You can't live for literature. You can't live for the job.

Historical novels are hard to do for the general public for commercial writers like myself.

I grew up in a house with a lot of kids, brothers and sisters. So I don't mind a lot of talking, yelling, playing. I can tune most of that out.