“When you grow up and have children of your own, do please remember something important: a stodgy parent is no fun at all. What a child wants and deserves is a parent who is sparky.”

When you’re writing, it’s rather like going on a very long walk.

The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it.

I am suspicious of both facility and speed.

We make realities out of our dreams and dreams out of our realities. We are the dreamers of the dream.

If the Good Lord intended for us to walk, he wouldn’t have invented rollar skates.

An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details.

Me is the only one what won’t be gobbled up because giants is never eating giants.

Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.

Pain was something we were expected to endure. But I doubt very much if you would be entirely happy today if a doctor threw a towel in your face and jumped on you with a knife.

A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.

I’m wondering what to read next.

I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life.

Good writing is essentially rewriting.

All the reading she had done had given her a view of life that they had never seen.

Perhaps it’s chasing me. But I don’t think it will ever catch me because I am moving fast.

The greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places.

When I was young, I didn’t play like I do today. So these kids are starting at the height that I’ve reached. Think what they might do over time.

If I can help a kid discover a liking, or even a passion for music in their life, then that’s a wonderful thing.

I feel sorry for the poor kids whose parents feel they’re qualified to teach them at home. Of course, some parents are smarter than some teachers, but in the main I see home-schooling as misguided foolishness.

I think kids growing up, if they were picked on and feeling inferior at 12, they’re going to feel that way at 72. You just deal with it better. I’m serious.

As I get more and more involved in the child’s world with Rocco his son I’m getting interested in making a film for children.

I want my weekends off and I want to put my kids to bed. Those are good reasons to want to be in ‘Batman 2’.

New York is a galaxy of adventure at once elegant, exciting and bizarre. It’s a city that moves so fast, it takes energy just to stand still.

As an African American child growing up in the segregated South, I was told, one way or another, almost every day of my life, that I wasn’t as good as a white child.