Someone told me once - I mean I said, "Is it ok that I don't really know what the three-act structure is?" And he said, "It's basically: Act 1: a guy climbs up a tree; Act 2: people come and throw stuff at him; Act 3: he gets down."

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've also found that trying to be active with social media changes my moment-to-moment perceptions. Instead of feeling, "What's the deepest version of what's happening here?" I start to feel, "How can I use [or "claim"] this?".

Irony is just honesty with the volume cranked up.

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

The writer, in order to proceed, is theoretically trying to predict where his complex skein of language and image has left his reader, who he has likely never met and who is actually thousands of readers.

For me, things were either very sullied or very pure, very controlled or very under-controlled.