What we do is as American as lynch mobs. America has always been a complex place.

I listen to anything anyone gives me. I always go back to a few basic favorites. I can always listen to Django Reinhardt and hear something I haven't heard before. I like to listen to Art Tatum and Coltrane and Charlie Parker. Those are guys who never seem to run out of ideas.

My kids seem to be more mature and older than I am now somehow. They've gotten ahead of me somehow. But they're very patient with me.

And there's a lot of that stuff with people bringing their kids, kids bringing their parents, people bringing their grandparents - I mean, it's gotten to be really stretched out now. It was never my intention to say, this is the demographics of our audience.

I don't have no fear of death. My only fear is coming back reincarnated.

I believe in books that do not go to a ready-made public. I'm looking for readers I would like to make. To win them, to create readers rather than to give something that readers are expecting. That would bore me to death.

I was dying to start shooting for 'Paiyya.' I had worn no good clothes for months, and I was dying to wear good clothes. And, for 'Paiyya,' they gave me eight clothes to change in a day!

Form is, in a way, death. A novelist's obligation is to break free from the form, even though he knows that this will also be seen as artificial and distanced from life.