The writer has to take risks and go somewhere full of mystery and possibility for the novel to deepen over the years it takes to write it.

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.

The things that you consistently think of yourself and your abilities will always overwrite the things that people say about you.

Without critical work, political awareness is likely to remain superficial and rhetorical.

The American people are growing extremely unhappy with establishment politics, with establishment economics, and you know what else? Even with establishment media.

You can’t go the distance with too much resistance

There are no truths outside the Gates of Eden.

Never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance in the world to pursue your dreams.

Because when I looked at you across that table at the diner, no one else existed. And whether or not anything happens between you and me, it took meeting you to show me what I was missing.

Men who know are secure. Men who don't know believe in luck.

I would rather do movies because I'm very lazy and the hours are much easier.

Generative ideas emerge from joint thinking, from significant conversations, and from sustained, shared struggles to achieve new insights from partners in thought.