It's highly competitive to be here. People don't come to California to drop out anymore. It's a very striving place.

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.

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 think California is playing a game of brinkmanship that's very dangerous. Why is it 50 or 60 years ago we had the capacity to lay down the physical, psychological, cultural, public infrastructure of a global mega-state, and today we are on the verge of being Honduras?

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.

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