Our future can't be separated from the fact that we are all going to be increasingly compacted into urban areas, though we're different in race and culture and religion. And what we make of that will determine the American future.

While I think storytelling is a meaningful way to spend your life... it does feel a little bit secondary or off-point.

I'm making a lot of money. I should be paying a lot more taxes. I'm not paying taxes at a rate that is even close to what people were paying under Eisenhower. Do people think America wasn't ascendant and wasn't an upwardly mobile society under Eisenhower in the '50s? Nobody was looking at the country then and thinking to themselves, "We're taxing ourselves into oblivion." Yet there isn't a politician with balls enough to tell that truth because the whole system has been muddied by the rich. It's been purchased.

The best #‎ gift we can give in any interaction is to leave people feeling lighter, #‎ happier , and more at #‎ peace .

The rest of America, with some small exceptions, has been bulldozed and rebuilt and then bulldozed and rebuilt again. Our places have become interchangeable. Here in New Orleans, everything from the architecture to the way in which people eat, the way in which they talk, the way in which they do business, the way in which they dance, the manner in which everything is set to a parade beat, they're all from here. There's no place like it.

To be told you've won a MacArthur fellowship is very flattering and gratifying personally.

Every day, human beings are worth less. That's the triumph of capitalism. The money gets made, and the fewer people we need to make that money.