I get very antsy when I'm not occupied.

I grew up in the American South, the segregated South. Now we have a black man who is president. It was an age of apartheid, and now that's over. It was an age of two superpowers frozen in a cold war, and now that's resolved. So history marches on, except for this Arab-Israel conflict, which seems to have a claim on being eternal.

You can't tell a story linearly if you want people to understand.

Chronology can be dangerous. You can get so linear that it becomes robotic for the reader.

I feel like a 1960s graduate student. I still work on note cards. I've never found a better system.

From the very beginning, when you go into Scientology your world narrows down very quickly.

When I was trained as a journalist, as a race-relations reporter in Nashville covering the end of the civil-rights movement, we were strictly forbidden to use the first-person pronoun. There was kind of an electric charge around it. To come out from hiding and use the word 'I' carried a lot of fright for me.