There is a long American tradition of suspicion of concentrated economic power because of its tendency to corrupt government and turn it from a democracy into a plutocracy.

In Europe, populism is sort of a dirty word, but we have this wonderful history of populism in America, including the abolitionist populists and the white and black populists working together in the nineteenth century.

I tend to think that knowledge is preceded by power instead of the other way around.

People respond to political characters in archetypal ways. A fun game is to think of a politician and ask, "Which god is that? Are they like Aries? Are they like Athena?"

If you think art is a competitive forum, then you're going to stop doing it if you're not good. But if it's not competitive, it's something that you'll keep doing.

New York City is one of the most vulnerable cities in the world to climate change, so I see Keystone as the central threat to New York.

I feel much more comfortable in politics than I did in book writing. Book writing is so hard. Politics felt easy compared to that.