We were taking collections for people with AIDS in New York around Easter.

Why not collect and clean chicken wishbones in the run-up to Christmas spray them silver and use each to pinch together a white hem-stitch napkin?

If you want to build a ship don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

You know it's sort of common wisdom among New York publishers that short story collections don't make money.

What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes?

I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

Everything everything in war is barbaric... But the worst barbarity of war is that it forces men collectively to commit acts against which individually they would revolt with their whole being.

When it comes to locations I'm one of those crazy authors who has to see it touch it taste it before I trust myself to recreate it for my readers. Having said that visiting a locked-down pediatric psych ward was the most intimidating research I've ever done - and I've visited maximum security prisons shooting galleries bone collections etc.

I'm passionate and I travel the world not just as a tourist but to understand cultures... I've lived with Masai tribe... I travel the world and bring it back in the form of a research book that would become the starting point for the collection.