There were other auto manufacturers that were confabulating as much as [Buckminster Fuller] was, making claims about how cars resembled this or that aspect of nature.

I don't think that I am hopeful because I have some data that you don't, that I am going to share with you and going to convince you on that basis.

To me, the reason to write about [Buckminster] Fuller is because I think that he has ideas that are incredibly pertinent.

[Buckminster] Fuller said that everything at the time was basically a horse and buggy in the form of an automobile and it had that boxiness and basically aeronautics hadn't been invented.

I think that I feel that I have no choice but to operate under the illusion, which may be a delusion, that we can somehow get past the destruction that we have brought and that we are causing today.

I didn't grow up with [Buckminster Fuller]. I never met him. I was once close to meeting him as a child at a ski resort one summer. He died in 1983. Only in 1999 or so, 2000, when I was working as an editor at San Francisco Magazine, did I really come back around to that name because Stanford University had just acquired the archive.

[Buckminster] Fuller's idea of progress is a very 1950s organization man out of the military sort of idea of progress. So as a result, you have something like: we've got bad weather in New York City; let's put a dome over it. And so I don't want to put a dome over Manhattan and I hope that nobody who ends up reading the book wants to do so as a result.