I think it was impossible not to come upon a lot of confabulation simply because any good scholarship that has been done since [Buckminster Fuller] death has really delved in that.

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.

I don't know whether what I do is art. But making things out in the world and having as many conversations as possible.

...there's no reason why scholarship can't be as seriously playful as bubble-blowing.

All sorts of problems and the interconnectedness between them that [Buckminster Fuller] was able to perceive sometimes rightly, often wrongly, always interestingly and also the fact that he was looking at solutions often that were not feasible in his own time but potentially could be applied today.

I became really absorbed but again I was at that point - and I still remain today - an outsider who has no interest in becoming an insider, let alone in what that insider perspective on [Buckminster Fuller] has come to be and come to represent.

I'm not especially interested in the job of the historian or journalist of trying to figure out what was true and what was not.