I do miss the Chocolate City of my youth.

Many fathers and sons never get to reconcile their differences or come to an understanding that fills the gap between love and expectations.

The Turnaround' isn't even really a crime novel. But you need conflict to make a novel, any kind of novel, and I don't know any other way to do it than crime.

After college, I spent a decade working the kinds of jobs that I write about - bartender, shoe salesman, kitchen man - while voraciously reading novels.

I don't believe in publicity before a film is completed. It costs you money and wastes your energy, and you're inflating your balloon before you have a balloon.

In Asia, a lot of successful economies that had been living on their own saving, decided to open up their financial markets to international capital in the early 1990s. So here were countries doing quite well, but they decided they'd borrow a bit more and do even better.

Lordy, lordy, lordy do I love money. It is a character flaw, no doubt, one that springs from a panicked childhood in which I always felt as if our family was only a couple missed child support payments from being tossed onto the pitiless streets of our suburban New Jersey town.

I'm saying there's plenty of money out there for great consumer entrepreneurs with great consumer products attacking really big markets.