I love the feeling of being on the hunt - the feeling that the story is refusing to be solved in some lesser way and is insisting that you see it on its highest terms.

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 people have come to expect that in artistic representation; that every work of art should be a work of extravagant hope.

Positive human action is not only possible, but pervasive; human beings can improve and choose light and so on. And this is all happening.

I actually believe that a lot of what people call originality has to do with persistence in the craft.

If I go to the coffee shop and have a nice interaction with the barista, I don't know what that does for world peace, but we have to assume that in the great basket of goodness maybe that's one little micron or one little neutron that you've put in there.

Suddenly absurdism wasn’t an intellectual abstraction, it was actually realism. You could see the way that wealth was begetting wealth, wealth was begetting comfort — and that the cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was the erosion of grace.