I live and die with the Chicago Cubs

Sometimes I think I'm a one-trick pony because I'm not very inventive about new ways of telling stories.

Around the time I turned 30, I wanted to publish a novel

Don't tell me I have latent sexism or racism that I need to confront. I don't believe that. I think we are so burned by the current situation that we want somebody that it isn't possible to have. We want someone who definitely looks like the messiah.

Heart surgeons do not have the world's smallest egos: when you ask them to name the world's three leading practitioners, they never can remember the names of the other two.

Organizer is kind of a grand term for what I was doing.

The day of the march, we were forbidden to go to the march site. The man I worked for, the Presbyterian minister, knew we would want to be sort of martyrs for the cause and risk arrest. He didn't want any of that going on. So he made us stay in the neighborhood.