Success makes opportunities and so many of those "opportunities" are actually exemptions - from hardship, from unfriendliness, from struggle.

Whole swaths of the book [Lincoln in the Bardo] are made up of verbatim quotes from various historical sources, which I cut up and rearranged to form part of the narrative.

Our first responsibility in all things is to preserve our goodness of heart - then and only then act.

I came away believing and really deeply troubled by is the extent to which you can have two well-intentioned people talking in a friendly spirit and you get to a point where the two mutual mythologies just don't intersect. So kind of the next piece I'd like to write or think about is how did this left-right divide get so weird and codified.

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.

We've got a real problem with social media that we didn't know we were going to have. It's almost like the demons have gotten out of the box.

I have this tendency to take a little bit of questionable knowledge and riff on it.