Tell me it's forbidden, unthinkable, and that's where I want to go. Because the chances are it's complicated, and the complications are meaningful.

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.

When I moved out of my mom's house at 18 I was almost as sad to leave her sewing machine behind as anything else.

Back when I was in theater school, trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life, 'Sweeney Todd' was a huge touchstone for me, my favorite musical for sure.

How shall I be able to rule over others, that have not full power and command of myself?

Imaginary numbers are a fine and wonderful refuge of the divine spirit almost an amphibian between being and non-being.

It is far more important the law should be administered with absolute integrity, than that in this case or in that the law should be a good law or a bad one.

I'm all for a quiet life. I just didn't get one.

If I'm trusting myself, I will stare at all the possible ways I could fail. If I'm trusting God, I will stare at all the possible ways He'll use this whether I fail or succeed.

How many thoughts float in and out of your head without your stopping to identify them? How many ideas and insights have escaped because you forgot to pay attention?

It's our dreams that keep us going, that seperate us from the beasts. I wouldn't even want to live if I thought it was all just eating and sleeping and taking off my clothes.

What my job is, is to get on with getting the process of democratic politics, back on the road, entrenching the peace settlement, and I ask you to judge me on my record.