I am always trying to do something new and different. The first step is curiosity, questions. You pay attention to what fascinates you. If you can't shake it, there is something there.

Your memories from your early childhood seem to have such purchase on your emotions. They are so concrete.

Occupy Wall Street means making Wall Street and the corporate power elite understand that the people affected by the binge of unregulated greed are not going away, and they are not going to give up.

All roads lead to Wall Street, but we feel the effects of Wall Street on every street corner. Certainly in Syracuse, N.Y., where I live.

The issue isn't, Am I good enough? No. The issue is, Do I not have any other choice? Will and desire don't matter. Ability doesn't matter. Need is the only thing that matters.

The novel is about, for me, sustained and organized looking. I do think that people have a hunger for a sustained engagement, that concentration that the book can offer.

In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how I keep writing them.

I have to say that movies have as much impact on me as music. And that I learned as much about narrative from movies as I did from reading novels, how to arrange stories, how to juxtapose things.

A good novel should be deeply unsettling - its satisfactions should come from its authenticity and its formal coherence. We must feel something crucial is at stake.

Yes, I did try acting when I was in high school and I was terrible at it. So I definitely have had the experience of being bad at artistic endeavor.

I am a great procrastinator. When the writing is going really well, the laundry piles up.

There's no secret on how to attain a greater height, just keep climbing the ladder, don't look at the dreadful distance, lock up that negative thoughts today, and fulfil your dreams.

Empathy is the sunlight to the vampire of culture.

My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them.

When your car rattles when you drive, you know you are playing cool music.

The angels may have wider spheres of action, may have nobler forms of duty; but right with them and with us is one and the same thing.

For children, most importantly, being in the garden is something magical.

For forty days he went out into the desert - and never shot anything [on Jesus]

Would you respect a God you could comprehend? And yet very often that’s what we want - a God who reflects our culture, our biases, our economic, political, and military systems.

The understanding of mathematics is necessary for a sound grasp of ethics.

When the subconscious mind must chose between deeply rooted emotions and logic, emotions will almost always win.