The idea that you live your life in phases - I've never bought that. I feel like I'm the same person who sat in at the draft board in 1965, I'm the same person who joined a fraternity, I'm the same person who got an MFA at Bennington, and I'm the same person who founded Weather Underground. My values are still intact.

Everyone who knew [Barack] Obama from being in Hyde Park knew he was the smartest guy in any room he walked into; a decent, compassionate, lovely person; pragmatic, middle-of-the-road and ambitious.

I have an addiction to caffeine.

Teaching has always been, for me, linked to issues of social justice. I've never considered it a neutral or passive profession.

Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.

Well, first of all I think that we have to be careful with terms like the working class, obviously. When [Karl] Marx wrote about the working class he was writing about something much more bounded than we're talking about.

[The whole first year at university] was a great time for me and great time of awakening.