Success is like a mountain in front of you that keeps growing. If you're not careful, it will take up your whole life.

Some of our writers are starting to incorporate elements of social media, etc. in the work itself, which is all for the good, I think - finding new ways of being poetic.

Of course there's objective truth, but when we're looking at people's accounts of it, it seems the real truth lies in the accretion of all these different versions.

I've had that my whole career. People were always hedging around the question of: Why are you so dark? What happened to you?

Both [Donald] Trump and Bernie [Sanders] got to this idea of the vanishing middle class sooner and with more passion than more mainstream politicians, and benefited from it. The difference, of course, is that Bernie understood this in a more compassionate framework, and talked about it in conjunction with a revitalization of another part of the American project, which is the notion that we are all created equal, and that our laws and culture and action ought to reflect that.

I don't feel like I have the intelligence to really inhabit a consistently high level of prose.

One of the revelations in that book [Lincoln in the Bardo] for me was this idea about citizenship. Even that word - citizenship - for someone my age, it makes me cringe. But, to me, the political space we're in now argues for a reboot of fairly simple ideas and the examination of the way that Americans have not been living into them.