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.

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.

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.

I am a great procrastinator. When the writing is going really well, the laundry piles up.

All beings are vast multidimensional masters. They may be exploring divinity or limitation, but they are masters nonetheless. Then it becomes ok to simply allow them their process.

Anyone who has genuinely seen God is deeply convicted of his or her own sin.

I go to movies, go out with friends, go to car shows. I have a zoo.

My age now, like my age 20 years ago, marks the year in which I was born. That's all.

If you handed [character] a glass that was 90% full, he'd tell you that the 10% empty part proved that no one really cared about water.

I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling.

If heaven gives me ten more years, or an extension of even five years, I shall surely become a true artist.

After knowledge comes wisdom. After wisdom comes understanding.

Hollywood has definitely grown, in embracing the inclusion of Latinos in the world, because, for some time, we didn't exist. We were not part of any stories.