Look at Gleason in The Honeymooners. He was humorous but the way he lived wasn't really humorous. He was a bus driver. Who wants to be a bus driver? He didn't have any money and he was not famous. But despite that the show is humorous.

The breakdown of the black community in order to maintain slavery began with the breakdown of the black family. Men and women were not legally allowed to get married because you couldn't have that kind of love. It might get in the way of the economics of slavery. Your children could be taken from you and literally sold down the river.

Writers now are putting total faith in designers at Apple and Amazon. It's almost like a race-car driver having no input into how cars are designed.

I made a very conscious effort to finish 'The Cypress House' before 'So Cold the River' launched because I thought that would help build a buffer between my writing and any impact that came from either the success or the failure of that first book.

We have that illusion that we are 'deciding' what to make a character do in order to 'convey our message' or something like that. But at least in my experience you are often more like a river-rafting guide who's been paid a bonus to purposely steer your clients into the roughest possible water.

The science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the streams of history like the grains of gold in the sand of a river and the knowledge of the past the record of truths revealed by experience is eminently practical as an instrument of action and a power that goes to making the future.

Just as there's garbage that pollutes the Potomac river there is garbage polluting our culture. We need an Environmental Protection Agency to clean it up.

In the rich world the environmental situation has improved dramatically. In the United States the most important environmental indicator particulate air pollution has been cut by more than half since 1955 rivers and coastal waters have dramatically improved and forests are increasing.

There are 4 billion cell phones in use today. Many of them are in the hands of market vendors rickshaw drivers and others who've historically lacked access to education and opportunity. Information networks have become a great leveler and we should use them together to help lift people out of poverty and give them a freedom from want.

I think everyone should go to college and get a degree and then spend six months as a bartender and six months as a cabdriver. Then they would really be educated.