If you watch a movie from between the end of the Second World War and the mid-1970s, whenever anyone steps out in a white lab coat, they're there to offer a solution. They're there to tell you how the laser's going to save the day. They're going to give you James Bond's array of tools. After about 1975, whenever the man in the white lab coat steps out, it's to come up with some crazy idea that's going to bring ruin on everybody. "Let's clone dinosaurs!" And the last we see of him is disappearing down the gullet of the Tyrannosaurus rex.

In journalism I can only tell what happened. In fiction, I can show it.

Venezuela has gone from being a democratic country 15 years ago to being totally not a democracy today. Usually that de-democratization doesn't take the form of a heavy handed police state.

If you go on TV and say there's no other country in the world where you can be born poor and become rich, you get a huge megaphone. If you tell the truth, which is that most of the studies show actually the United States is worse than anybody except Britain in upward mobility, there is no audience for you.

Speech writers are more vulnerable to vanity than any other group of people in Washington.

Elites are inevitable in politics. That is how politics is going to work. The question is, are your elites responsible, public-spirited? Do they think about the interests of others, not just themselves? And the story of Western politics since the beginning of the century is that as elites become more separated, more selfish, as they leave behind their populations and don't think about them, they become discredited. And the people look for alternatives. But the alternative is worse. Those rules of the game protect us all. And they are more precious than almost any political outcome.

Events don't happen because I write a speech. I am allowed to write a speech because events are going to happen.