How much more money do we have to waste, how many more families have to be destroyed, how many more people have to be killed before you summon the courage to tell the truth to the American people?

If you let people believe that you are weak, sooner or later you’re going to have to kill them.

A lot of times, writers are told write as big as you can, and that's not untrue. But at times I think it's better to write as small as you can, to start scenes with little personal details or people who are doing average every day human things. That, to me, lets the average reader into that person's life. "Yeah I eat breakfast. I take a shower."

I have to remind the people who put down East Coast surfing that Kelly Slater is from Florida.

The Americans take a product that literally grows on trees and turn it into a valuable commodity. Without them, cocaine and marijuana would be like oranges, and instead of making billions smuggling it, I’d be making pennies doing stoop labor in some California field, picking it.

I think people will be surprised at some of the things about the shootings by policemen of unarmed African-American men. But I also think it's a balanced view. Balance has become almost a dirty word these days. It seems we're supposed to pick one side or the other. But these issues are extremely complicated. I think people will be surprised at some of that.

American cops are the ones who are in the emergency rooms. They're the ones who go to the morgues. They're the ones who have to go tell the families that their son is not coming back, their husband, their wife, is not coming home that night. So when we talk about guns and gun violence and police, let's understand that as well. No one wants guns off the streets more than cops because cops are killed by those guns.