I have an addiction to caffeine.

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.

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

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.

I went underground. So I didn't see [my father] for 11 years. So that was pretty traumatic time for my parents for sure.

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 don't know why there's not more activism today. I do think that your generation is twenty times smarter than our generation ever was, but the problem with being smart like you guys is that it can lead you really easily to being cynical, and cynicism is actually a pacifying attitude.