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

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?

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.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

Our society is not a community but merely a collection of isolated family units.

Science is built up of facts as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.

I've just finished my next collection Possible Side Effects and I'm now working on a collection of holiday stories as well as a memoir about my relationship with my father.

I've got a book of poetry by the bed one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.

Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.

So now I have a collection of poetry by Aaron Neville and I give it to people I want to share it with. I'd like to publish it someday.

I published privately a collection of my serious poetry I had written over the years. I only published 50 copies which I gave to friends in a special deluxe edition. It was ridiculously expensive but I'm glad that I did it.

My recollection of a hundred lovely lakes has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day. It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful.

From childhood I was passionately fond of music and wanted to be a musician. I have no recollection of any real desire ever to be anything else.

I'm a big collector of vinyl - I have a record room in my house - and I've always had a huge soundtrack album collection. So what I do as I'm writing a movie is go through all those songs trying to find good songs for fights or good pieces of music to layer into the film.

My recollection is - and I'd have to confirm this - but I don't recall paying any money to go to law school.