“The election of Donald Trump is, to me, this very clownish personality with no political experience, who had literally been using fascist slogans in his campaign. It had seemed so impossible.”

We think, “Well, what are you gonna do?” In a way, that little instinct, that “What are you gonna do?” is the most dangerous thing in the world.

I think it’s hard sometimes for people to grapple with the real-life consequences of political change.

There is little novelty in the detective who cannot solve himself.

A book is not a tweet. A book is not a half-hour television show. A book requires for both reader and writer sustained discipline attention. It asks you to immerse yourself in something and really deeply feel it.

Our political divides have become our personal divides.

Because as any writer will tell you, an IDEA for a book is like falling in love, it’s all wild emotion and headlong rush, but the ACTUAL ACT of writing a book is like building a relationship: it is joyous, slow, fragile, frustrating, exhilarating, painstaking, exhausting, worth it.

It is part of what makes America great. That tradition of the free press, and also the tradition of this highly competitive market for investigative journalism. We’re seeing, there’s no question, that we’re seeing a renaissance of that.

I think that if there is a great gift that this [Donald Trump] election gave us, is this sort of sense of vigilance, the sense that we have to remain on guard. We have to support our free press.

One thing we’ve learned about Donald Trump – this candidate first, president-elect, and now president – is that he has this sort of reptilian instinct for rooting out supposed enemies and finding people he can whip up distrust into rage.

History is not the linear sort of movement toward better and better things.

Fiction has this special power. It has a power to clarify, to galvanize, to prophesy, and warn.

The membrane between where we are right now and a very different reality, is so much thinner than we like to think. Things can go back, and things can go to the side, and things can go to places where we might not even have been on guard that they might go.

I think that, we as a culture, feel like politics is one sector of our lives that can feel apart from our personal lives and the cultural things we’re interested in and the sports we watch. It feels like this separate, different thing.

A pool of melancholy blooms in my chest and rushes into my body like deep-blue blood.

We forget the conditions – not only in slavery – but after slavery, when there was this purposeful locking out of African Americans from economic opportunity. Or we forget today’s incarceration rates, and educational and housing discrimination; all of these things.

I think that one thing fiction can offer, and must offer, is a place where someone’s mind and their imagination can come to rest for a little while.

What you see on the campaign trail is me. It’s easy being me.

The Muslim world is deeply hurt by the campaign of violence initiated against our Palestinian brothers.

Think about it – most political campaigns are based around values. Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign galvanized millions of youth behind two very clear values – hope and change.

You’re a trivial part in a trivia game. Now what’s your aim? A presidential campaign? Like Ross Perot? He lost it though… But he got a billion in tha bank fo’ sho’!

Anyone who campaigns for public office becomes disqualified for holding any office at all.

Each day was a challenge of enjoyment, and he [Hemingway] would plan it out as a field general plans a campign.

Like a midwife, I make my living bringing new babies into the world, except that mine are new advertising campaigns.

If I were running a campaign, I’d urge taking the mountain of money reportedly squandered on pizza, coffee and bagels and spending it more wisely – on a talented young comedy writer.