You are always working towards the moments in which characters experience reckonings or insight or change. I like to track them past those moments.

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.

Don’t be afraid. Be focused. Be determined. Be hopeful. Be empowered.

My father was against the death penalty, and that was hard in the Son of Sam summer when fear was driving the desire for the death penalty.

Do not set out to write with your eyes on the box office. It can't be done.

Sometimes you get politicians who dig their feet into the sand and aren't willing to listen to another voice.

Stick with the people who love you and don’t spend a single second on the rest. Life will be better that way.

On Earth they've forgotten how to make everything except money. But what good is it, if there's nothing worthwhile left to buy?

It is a maxim that will endure: To truly know the living God, this begets humility.

One of the drawbacks to life is that it contains moments when one is compelled to tell the truth.

Painting is an investigation of being.

The worse the passage the more welcome the port.