I like the challenge of creating a world with only sentences.

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.

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.

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.

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.

The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.

Don’t be a shallow person. Do everything with zealous devotion, as you would do it for Christ

The love of dress is very marked in this attractive animal.

Conservatives tend to believe there is a close and necessary connection between prosperity and freedom - that economic freedom is an essential part of human freedom.

More and more of our imports are coming from overseas

My wife is Mexican and my constituency is very, very multicultural.

Most of the bad taste I've been accused of has been generic bad taste; it's been making fun of an idea as opposed to a person.

One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny.

The odds will always favor the man with a plan