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

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.

Who can be close to you without the Divine Light of his heart?

Britain's best bulwarks are her wooden walls.

By nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a street porter, as a mastiff is from a greyhound

Tall people have a real advantage in the world.

You can't just do one of the things, because it won't be enough to combat the climate change that we're already starting to experience. It will only get worse.

My mom had four kids, one with special needs. She had a full-time job, and she still came home and made dinner for us every night, from scratch. It was amazing.

For there's nothing we read of in torture's inventions, Like a well-meaning dunce, with the best of intentions.

Sometimes I love acting but then sometimes I think it's too much for me. And I don't know if it is something that I could do for the rest of my life.

The last thing we should do is allow ourselves to be infantilized by a counterfeit version of enlightenment.

This life is what you make it. Not matter what, you're going to mess up sometimes, it's a universal truth.