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

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.

I've always tried to write California history as American history. The paradox is that New England history is by definition national history, Mid-Atlantic history is national history. We're still suffering from that.

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.

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 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.

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