I think most writers have to have a practice of writing. For me it is very early in the morning. I try to make it a separate world from the rest of my life.

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.

The foremost calling of the human brain is to script a safe, secure, and joyous future for a person.

Apathy is giving up when we need to get up.

You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold onto her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement.

Mindfulness is the ability to do physical things in a harmonious way; it is a way to remain centered in a physical world that is out of balance.

The opposite of bad is not good.The opposite of bad is love

If you want to find greater happiness and fulfillment in your life, you must begin to understand and live in harmony with the law of attraction.

It is dangerous and harmful to be guided in our life's course by hatreds and aversions, for they are wasteful of energy and limit and twist the mind and prevent it from perceiving the truth.

We must combine the toughness of the serpent with the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart.

Give them your brains, girl, never your guts.

Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.