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

I think that most people have deeply creative sensibilities.

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 those people in power never made any mistakes, we'd be done for as a democracy. But people keep making mistakes. History is a series of mistakes.

Because jurors have an extraordinary amount of power over the situation and of the people and the story in front of them, they tend to pay pretty intense attention to what's happening.

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 be a kind of left federalist. There's a value to more power of certain kinds being positioned at a more local level.