“I'm just an alcoholic who became a writer so that I would be able to stay in bed until noon.”

“It's one of the reasons I became a writer, to be able to smoke in peace.”

“You can't sleep until noon with the proper élan unless you have some legitimate reason for staying up until three”

“I'm 82 years old, wherever I go everybody knows me, but here's why… I'm a merchandiser, I'm not just a writer, I stay in every avenue you can think of.”

“Never get out of bed before noon.”

“No. But it was indicated by other people that I should go there—like my wife, my friends, the woman from Alcoholics Anonymous who came around. My wife, Dottie, was the prime mover. It would have been a disappointment to her if I'd rejected her suggestion. I stayed until they were done with me. I don't know if it 'worked.”

“I'm not an intellectual, I'm just a writer.”

“Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol.”

“Of course I'm a black writer…. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call "literature" is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hassidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.”

“So from the age of 10, I became anorexic, and then bulimic, and then stayed that way for about 20 years, until one day I just said, "Hey, what if this is it? What if this is just what I look like and nothing I do changes that? So how much time would I save if I stopped taking that extra second every time I look in the mirror to call myself a big fat fuck? How much time would I save if I just let myself walk by a plate-glass window without sucking in my gut and throwing back my shoulders? How much time would I save?"”