My greatest fear is feeling like a professional novelist. Somebody who creates characters, who sits down and has pieces of paper taped to the wall - what's going to happen in this scene, or this act. What I like is for it to be a much more scary, sloppy reflection of who I am.

Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, user's manual, timeline, poem or palimpsest - and yet it is all these things.

I see bad stuff on the street all the time that I don't do anything about. I do bad stuff myself all the time. The goal is not to somehow be perfect - that's silly, that's naive. The goal is to just recognize there are choices in front of us, and to try to make better ones.

There are two kinds of sculptures. There's the kind that subtracts: Michelangelo starts with a block of marble and chips away. And then there is the kind that adds, building with clay, piling it on. The way I write novels is to keep piling on and piling on and piling on.

Now Dave Eggers, if you lived in San Francisco, is not an easy person to be done with. Everyone - and by everyone, I mean every white person with a college education and an interest in books - wants a piece of him. It's not just his amazingly powerful prose; it's also his charitable works.

After using four different languages on an album, it's tough to decide which one I'm gonna actually learn to speak. I always study the lyric, make sure I know what I'm singing, and try to get the pronunciation as perfect as possible.

I believe young people from working families should have access to debt-free education because I know from my own experience that a high-school degree is not always enough, and a higher education can change a life.

I married him because he told me it was the only way he could protect me. If we were just manager and client, my family could do whatever they wanted to get me back, but if I was his wife, they couldn't.