If the Pilgrims had landed in Santa Monica Bay rather than Boston, we'd have six states out here!

In our public life, California is on the verge of being a failed state, and no state has failed in the history of this country.

I like narrative, and I ultimately am in love with the men and women I write about, most of them.

I believe that's a form of dangerous stereotyping, to ascribe permanent victimhood to any group. Groups have suffered powerful injustice, and yet when you say that, you also have to say that they triumphed, that they prevailed.

In the luxuriance of a bowl of grapes set out in ritual display, in a bottle of wine, the soil and sunshine of California reached millions for whom that distant place would henceforth be envisioned as a sun-graced land resplendent with the goodness of the fruitful earth.

The Irish didn't read and write for a couple of thousand years, and I think we developed good memories and recall. We have a sense of the revelatory detail. I look for them.

I don't reverberate to victimhood, probably because of my own life. I refused to become a victim myself, so it's not one of my big stories.