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 wasn't part of John Kennedy's vision of the world, or Lyndon Johnson's. I thought of them as anti-Communist imperial monsters.

I always say your body is the temple of your spirit, why not decorate it? My kids say, no, no, your body is the temple of your spirit, keep it clean. I'm covered in tattoos and I get a tattoo every time I write a book. I get the tattoo from the book.

Hating war in Vietnam in 1965 was minority position.

That's where we all kind of were in the mid-1960s. Students for a Democratic Society grew from a small group of socialists at the university of Michigan into a national organization, and in many ways, its growth was driven by the Vietnam War.

Nixon probably was a nice guy.

This 1965. We went to trial on our city. We were obviously borrowing tactics and strategy from the Black freedom movement, and we were echoing their approach to things.