As a book person and a movie person, I feel Jewish. My Dad was more Buddhist than anything, and on the West Coast I've often had the impression that Jews become Buddhists. I think, if anything, my religion has more to do with California consciousness, vibrations and energy. My wife isn't Jewish. There's nothing ceremonial going on at our house, I mean, occasionally a candle gets lit. But, definitely, my Judaism is an ongoing relationship, one that remains to be consummated.

This book, 'Free bird', is so entangled with politics. I wanted to channel my own internal political monologue in some way to get it out of my brain. I'm not happy that the themes of the book have become more relevant as the publication date nears. Most of it was written in 2014 or so, before the whole Donald Trump thing began. As people paying attention know, the rise of Trump and Trumpism is not an aberration or sudden kind of phenomena.

I'm the type of spiritual person that doesn't speak openly about their spirituality. Irony is probably my religion.

The debate analysis in the media is rampant with contest analogies of war, baseball, boxing, football; you name it. Any testosterone contest imaginable is fair game.

I think these large bureaucratic institutions are created in some way explicitly to inoculate anyone from actual responsibility, to create a much more diffuse and blameless kind of society.

Yo can’t reason someone out of something he didn’t reason himself into.

We moved up to Oregon when I was eight, and I think the radical absence of Jewish life here might have strangely made me feel more Jewish. It's a contextual thing I guess.