This voting thing is actually beautiful. Not just necessary - it's a wonderful thing and it makes you powerful. And we've forgotten that in the most negative [president's] campaign in history.

I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of.

We are, all of us, incoherent text, and just knowing that - knowing that no matter how much you say, 'I am this' and part of you is not that - means that you can say it.

I think the Trump thing is particularly egregious, and I think he's as much a product of the GOP lie machine in the era of Roger Ailes as he is of television. And also, of the Twitter era. Of the everything-is-as-reductive-as-it-can-be. To me, the most telling thing is we have a man who cannot complete a sentence. Certainly could never get to 140 characters, or past it. He thinks in tiny little bursts - the way he tweets.

Life's a show and we all play a part And when the music starts We open up our hearts

I did my English A level in England, and we studied Shakespeare. I had great, great high school teachers, and we parsed the text within an inch of its life.

Beautiful revelations of power are often written by the guy who got kicked around and didn’t have any power.