People who run for president seriously and people who become president enter a bizarre secret society in which they have had an experience that none of us will ever have.

I've made my evolutionary purpose and had children. I don't care if anybody likes me, I'm going to do what I want to do. I'm going to do a whole comedy show about swimming in the loathsomely cold waters of Maine.

By the way, if I have my own cult of personality with my own geodetic dome in western Massachusetts, I will have a hurt yurt for anyone who crosses me.

Only the nerds will save the earth.

The reality is that there is an enormous value to gut-check instinctive decision-making in the world that is not hampered by reams and reams of research and complexity.

Stories hold power because they convey the illusion that life has purpose and direction. Where God is absent from the lives of all but the most blessed, the writer, of all people, replaces that ordering principle. Stories make sense when so much around us is senseless, and perhaps what makes them most comforting is that, while life goes on and pain goes on, stories do us the favor of ending.

It's not a secret family like I have a beautiful, gorgeous wife in Tokyo; I have another mom and dad. I'm the kid and I have another mom and dad in Atwater Village, Los Angeles.