If I had it to do all over again . . . I wouldn't change a thing.'. . . the final expression of narcissism, the last gesture of self-congratulation.

Half the country seceded from the other half when Abraham Lincoln was elected because half the country couldn't abide his position on slavery. You would think 150 years later this had all become pretty historically incontestable. Yet millions continue to contest it in the face of history. Rather the denial of slavery and all its monstrous repercussions defines to one twin America what the country is and means, and therein is the DNA of those "alternative facts" that people believe when they can't stand to believe the truth.

I tell the stories in the way that feels natural to tell them.

One of the basic philosophical tenets of conservatism - which says that the more power devolves from the federal government to the states, the greater individual freedom grows - is just flatly contradicted by crucial junctures in the country's life, most conspicuously in the 1860s and 1960s, when it's been the federal government that's interceded against the states to secure individual freedom.

I'm my own "ideal reader" in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.

The material dictates the approach.

The material dictates the approach. I tell the stories in the way that feels natural to tell them. Certainly the last thing I want is to be "difficult."