My teaching exists in a different part of my brain. However, I am lucky enough to teach very smart graduate students.

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.

What you think about is what you get. The more you think about something, the more it manifests in your life.

There are more stolen bikes in my garage than there are stars in the galaxy.

I realized that the "thing" and the "concept" were substituted for feeling and understood the falsity of the world of will and idea

Japan!everything in details perfection.

I had become Harry Potter. Except I was thirteen and not magic, and my destiny, whatever it was, held no profound purpose.

Necessity may not be the opposite of freedom, and perhaps a man is most free when, instead of producing motives, he could only say, "I am what I do.

Beauty isn’t between a size zero and a size eight, it is not a number at all. It is not physical.

I'm not one of those people who thinks they simply deserves success. I have the drive to work. Maybe that's why I've stayed on the fringe.

Europe is nervous. Already rattled this year by the shock of the Brexit vote, the European Union needs stability in Italy, a country notorious for its instability.

Beyoncé is musically why I do what I do. She's an inspiration, she's incredible. I just love her.