If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter..

I'm seventy-six now. I'm at a stage in my life where I feel a lot of affection and regard for women, and I felt the need to make this clear in some w….

The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer..

I am aware of the changes, but in no sense am I believer that we live in a post-racial society. That's a description of our inheritance and that is t….

It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check..

Public libraries are the sole community centers left in America. The degree to which a branch of the local library is connected to the larger culture….

When an old man and a young man work together, it can make an ugly sight or a pretty one, depending on who's in charge. If the young man's in charge ….

Luck can't last a lifetime unless you die young..

Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely..

Driving home, it's all I can do to keep from crying. Time's come, time's gone, time's never returning, I say to myself. What's here in front of me is….

We are not buried in history, but surrounded by it. You can't avoid our behavior being shaped by it, to a considerable degree. We have this fantasy t….

Like Neanderthals, men prefer to hunt alone or, if in a pack, at the head of it. Women, whether in the field or in a campfire, are collaborative, and….

The United States particularly abandoned Liberia after the end of the Cold War..

Much more than memoir; it's history..

And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey..

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 anyho….

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

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

For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living e….

What you believe matters, however. It’s all anyone has to act on. And since what you do is who you are, your actions define you. If you don’t believe….

But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ord….