What was transformative was being at the inauguration, reading my poem, and realizing that the quest for home and identity had always been part of my work, but that I'd been home all along.

Good art and a good life answers questions. Great art and a great life asks questions.

Your life is a work of art that you will work on the rest of your life.

We have always been searching for home. It's in our art... our religion... everything.

Artists are the emotional historians of the world.

As an immigrant, there's a little part of you that always says, "Well, I'm not a hundred percent American." America is some other little boy or some other place I haven't been to yet.

Debt . . . . that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersect, often with explosive force.

He looked like an evil male model, showing off what the fashionable college-age villain was wearing to Harvard this year.

I would change policy, bring back natural grass and nickel beer. Baseball is the belly-button of our society. Straighten out baseball, and you straighten out the rest of the world.

I once was absolutely useless, and God in His grace has made me useful.

I had my dreams of Venice, but nothing that I had dreamed was as impossible as what I found.

Men and women aren't too dissimilar.

There's this idea that if you take your clothes off, somehow you must have loose morals.

I really believe that fiction functions best when stories are allowed to develop in an organic way, so I didn't set out to deliver a specific message.

That nonviolence which only an individual can use is not of much use in terms of society.

Nothing is difficult for the humble.