Nothing is more boring than some old person going on and on about the way things used to be.

It wasn't [Barack] Obama per se; it was the feeling on the ground; it was seeing an old black woman in a wheelchair being wheeled by her son waving a big American flag, and then seeing a guy with his baby in his arms saying, "I didn't want her to miss tonight! I wanted to be able to tell her!" And to see all these people, a Hispanic cop dancing with an old white woman, wow! I mean, that's the world I want to live in, and because it's the world I want to live in, I had a hard time leaving.

I haven't been silent. I teach, I lecture at universities, I write, I'm not silent.

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

So we were ecstatic and we swirled around spontaneously, the campus in Ann Harbor and about 4,000 of us landed on the steps of the president of the University of Michigan's home.

I'm not so much against the war as I am for a Vietnamese victory. I'm not so much for peace as for a U.S. defeat.

Without a doubt. It's woven into our DNA in a very deep way and so to kind of be smacked in the face with the hypocrisy of the America that we were sold was a liberating and harsh experience.