I would you say 25-50 percent is the likelihood that my cause of death will be suicide. Not because I am depressive but because I don't attach any moral baggage to suicide, and I have no religion to hold me back. I think suicide is our right, though I think we need to exercise it with knowledge that it can hurt others. So my assumption is that if I got a fatal disease, I'd end things before I got really sick.

Donald Trump is way worse than George W. Bush. George W. Bush is a fundamentally decent man of limited intelligence who surrounded himself with awful people who dragged him in terrible directions. He was a bad president. But he was not actively malign, in the sense that he did what he thought was right. I don't think this guy cares what's right. I think he's in it for self-aggrandizement, for profit, and for power.

Is it really the right of the media to dictate to the president whom he will allow in his press conferences? That's tetchier. And then there is the added issue of whether it would be a service to their readers, and the country at large, for, say, the Washington Post to take itself out of the room -- meaning they don't have the ability to ask important questions the president is obliged to answer? I think that would be a mistake.

The Jewish women like Bethany Mandel fare the worst, because they are getting both antisemitic stuff and anti-woman stuff.

Mostly, you become a writer not because you want to get rich or famous, but because you have to write; because there is something inside that must come out.

I do not believe in public shaming. I do believe that young adults go to college to learn things, and that this process will almost inevitably result in their making mistakes and misjudgments and otherwise acting badly.

America is an incredibly polarized country politically. I think ANY Republican would start out with 42 percent of the vote.