I'm not disappointed in [Barack] Obama. He said who he is; he's doing what he said he would do.

The [Vietnam] war's gone on for three years. And we'd thought we'd ended it because we'd done exactly what we were told and what we told ourselves we'd had to do. We had a majority. We were against the war and this created a crisis for democracy and a crisis for the antiwar movement.

Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don't have to be, of course; they can also be contradictory.

Now in my view, if you were to line up the Presidents in the order of who made the greatest accomplishments, you'd put Lyndon Johnson in that arena with both Roosevelts probably, and [Abraham] Lincoln and so on. But the idea that Lyndon Johnson was operating as a free agent and coming up with these ideas on his own is nonsense.

[Lyndon ] Johnson was responding to a black freedom movement that was tearing the country open and he did what he had to do as a conservative politician.

We have arguments [with my father] and we had a lot of arguments in the years when I was at Michigan.

It's amazing where the paranoid mind can take you.