I was going to public school in the post-World War II, the grey doldrum years. But I was in this extraordinary environment of Manhattan, of Greenwich Village, of bohemian parents.

I get very upset when money is being cut and people can't visit the Grand Canyon.

The whole red state/blue state thing is very interesting. Watching that shift over the years.

For me there is a poesis, a poetics, around the trope of the road that is embedded within many life experiences of the people I've been close to.

Literal thousands of Americans taking to the road and getting into that green automobile and just going. At the same time there is real incredible work [of art] that comes out of it. Never forget that.

I invoke that sense of the particulars of that kind of literal travel and what that has meant historically in terms of diasporas, in terms of the migrations of immigrants coming to this [U.S.] country with a real vision of finding the promised land.

I had parents who were attentive to what was going on politically. There was the Greek connection, a sense of a larger world. People coming in from abroad. There was a sense of community around ideas: a discourse and an adhesiveness which is my favorite word from [Walt] Whitman.