Sustaining the energy and focus involved in doing a good job I think starts to gets tougher the longer you do it.

I don't have a philosophical objection, necessarily, to a travel ban if that is the thing that is going to keep the American people safe.

Trump is not somebody who`s fit to be president in any circumstances. I would feel deeply frustrated, not because anything he said about me, but because I would fear for the future of our country.

When people are oppressed, and human rights are denied - particularly along sectarian lines or ethnic lines - when dissent is silenced, it feeds violent extremism, it creates an environment that is ripe for terrorists to exploit. When peaceful, democratic change is impossible, it feeds into the terrorist propaganda that violence is the only answer available.

At various periods in American history, people get pretty rambunctious when it comes to our democratic debate.

I didn't become a Christian until many years later, when I moved to the South Side of Chicago after college. It happened not because of indoctrination or a sudden revelation, but because I spent month after month working with church folks who simply wanted to help neighbors who were down on their luck no matter what they looked like, or where they came from, or who they prayed to. It was on those streets, in those neighborhoods, that I first heard God's spirit beckon me. It was there that I felt called to a higher purpose - His purpose.

There is a big part of me that has a writer's sensibility. And so that's how I think. That's how I pursue truth. That's how I hope to communicate truth to people.