Remember, I have a Ph.D. in English literature.

Cuba is like going to a whole other planet. It's so different but it's so similar to the United States, to Miami. It's like a doppelgaenger. It's the mirror image. And I have no doubt, that once Cuba becomes democratic, that it will be the favorite tourist destination for Americans.

My earliest childhood memory is of my father going crazy when the Giants won the World Series in 1954. He started whoopin' and hollerin' and jumpin' up and down all around the living room. I started crying because he scared me to death.

Our society is driven today by so much ethnic discord. We have Black Lives Matter, which I praise and celebrate. We have the demagogues stereotyping Muslims and resurrecting racist stereotypes they used to visit on us. The larger goal is to show that we are all the same, we all come from Africa, and we all have the same larger family tree. It's about the fundamental unity of the human community.

Conspiracy theories are an irresistible labor-saving device in the face of complexity.

All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian's footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small.

We must begin to understand the nature of intertextuality . . . the manner by which texts poems and novels respond to other texts. After all, all cats may be black at night, but not to other cats.