Even if we try to see people in our lives accurately, it is distorted by our own wants and prejudices and experiences.

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.

Love is the enchanted dawn of every heart.

....They're called "better halves" for a reason, I guess. You can't have one half that's worse than you. It'd be a disaster.

Secret 7591.42.21. Avoiding weasel words in your intelligence analysis isn't easy when your intelligence analysis is about weasels.

My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry.

You’re attacking that one like a wolverine.

I don't recognize this new brand of Republicanism that's afoot now, which I consider to be very reactionary, not conservative in many respects.

There is no moment, ever, that does not either hold an opportunity or a lesson that God is offering.

I'm not sexually confused in any way. I'm very much - the word is pansexual.

To govern is to choose. To appear to be unable to choose is to appear to be unable to govern.

All the mistakes I make arise from forsaking my own station and trying to see the object from another person's point of view.