If you at least try to do the things that excite you, it will make you a more expansive and present person - you’ll feel, at the end of your life, that at least you took the shot.

We have not been energetic enough - white people haven't - in pursuing racial equity.

Social media sometimes feels like a vehicle for one-dimensional sniping, more than true criticism.

Art is not some inessential frippery - it is the nation's means of intelligently regarding itself. To cripple or stigmatize the arts is to doom one's nation to a life of incuriosity, dullness, literalness and the worst kind of rank materialism.

I'm repledging myself to human-scale values. As a fiction writer, the best data comes through the senses and is then processed through many revisions. We have to learn to be intelligent assessors of the data coming in to us and what it's doing to our mental process.

I think this is the other big issue that is not going away: Do we really believe that bit in the Constitution or not? I think we do.

In fact unrestrained capitalism is quite cruel and the cost is on the individual human, on his or her grace.