Home is the place where there is somebody who does not wish you any pain.

If you're bored, your readers will be bored. If you're faking it, you won't get the kind of readers you want.

Obama can't be everything to everyone. He changed. He did. I never thought I'd hear Obama say, "Let's go back to nuclear arms," but he did. In the meantime, the clear and present danger is the Republicans in the Senate. A lot of politics isn't heroic, it's as day-to-day as our lives themselves. We always want to make the Byronic choices, but Byron himself was not Byronic all the time either.

The hardest thing about Berlin is letting it belong to other people.

I think that the Vietnam War era is important because we tend not to want to revisit it. For black people, there was the temptation of disaffection. People looked for alternative ways to express themselves personally and politically, people doubted the system, and there was the terrible kind of division in black America between a radical leadership and a much older, compromising leadership.

Hillary certainly needs the black vote, and Democrats need it. She's not doing anything too soon; she's raising her money and not wanting any issues to come back and bite her later. The black vote will be crucial for Hillary and so will the women's vote.

I can see criticizing, complaining, protesting - anything but choosing not to vote. Too many people died for us not to vote.