Every people, in order to remain healthy and strong, has to have a grasp of its foundation story. Culture is a chrysalis - it is protective, it takes care of you. That's what cultures are for. You cannot rob a people of language, culture, mother, father, the value of their labor - all of that - without doing vast damage to those people.

You try to steer a course in American society that's not self-destructive. But America is a country that inflicts injury. It does not like to see anything that comes in response, and accuses one of anger as if it were an unnatural response.

I was really worn down by an American society that is racist, smugly blind to it, and hugely self-satisfied.

We all have to die, and I preferred to have just one death. It seems to me that to suffer insult without response is to die many deaths.

I can't think of a more mediocre human talent than George Bush. He obviously is a product of family advantage, and he's the worst American President of all time.

I wanted to write and think. Activism is a displacing kind of passion.

I got a chance to be in a society where the barriers between classes - social and economic - are not insuperable, where money is not everything all the time.