I breathed the air of deliverance through books, and through books I leapt over the walls of confinement.

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

[Martin Luther King] King was a socialist and King was an activist who was really a radical by the end.

Every politician - FDR, Lyndon Johnson, Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama - they're all conservative by nature. They are part of the big thing and they're moving in a very constrained world.

Can we imagine a different world? I can. That's a world where work is rational, it's in the common good, and we're actually producing real things rather than spinning our wheels in dreams of consumer heaven.

One of the things that's complicated about writing anything is that it's an act of narcissism, and then of course once it sails out into the world, you have to let go of it.

I knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans.