Of course we all know that's not how life works. The novel that is our life can end at any time. Sometimes even on page one.

In another universe I probably came out OK, ended up with mad novias and jobs and a sea of love in which to swim, but in this world I had a brother who was dying of cancer and a long dark patch of life like a mile of black ice waiting for me up ahead.

[Donald] Trump is explained with the intersection of a number of things: our economic crisis, the way it's easier to blame immigrants, with the happenstance that he discovered that by bashing Latino immigrants and characterizing them as "rapists" and "murderers" and "scumbags," suddenly he's got this groundswell of support from a group of people who were raised on this vocabulary.

For me, the battle isn't Hillary [Clinton] vs. [Bernie] Sanders. And I understand that for some people that's the battle. But for me, more than anything, it's stopping a Republican president.

What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.

If we do not begin to practice the muscles of having a possessive investment in each other's oppressions, then we are in some serious trouble.

I guess it's true what they say: if you wait long enough everything changes.