In today's US, it's possible for almost anyone - women, gays, African-Americans, Jews - to run for, and be elected to, high office.

I've never rejected the world I came from. To be rejected by it is horrible.

The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.

I have always thought that these two ways of talking, one is the fantastic, the fable, the fairy tale, and the other being history, the scholarly study of what happened, I think they're both amazing ways to understand human nature.

We are the storytelling animal.

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.

It's true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind.