If you're going to get in the ring and try to take the belt, you have to prepare to get hit.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.

Under popular culture's obsession with a naive inclusion, everything is O.K.

I wanted to get to that aesthetic proposition that comes out of learning the human elements of a world, so that those notes and rhythms mean something to you besides just the academic way in which they fall in place.

If there's an intellectual highway, there's also an intellectual subway.

Louis Armstrong, who learned to be in exquisite dress, came from the bottom, and he's not a trash can.

Getting to the pint where the other is not the enemy is a big leap.