“I’m very interested in people who are in a situation that needs a little puzzling out. The thing that gets me started on a story is a person in a tough situation.”

One question is: Who is the working class today, and how has it changed? Where are we in that? I don’t have a knee-jerk kind of 1930s thing about we must build the unions and that’s the way to the future.

After I had known [Barack Obama] for a while, I remember saying to my partner, “You know, this guy is really ambitious, I think he wants to be Mayor of Chicago.” That was the limit of my imagination.

I get up every morning and think, today I’m going to make a difference. Today I’m going to end capitalism. Today I’m going to make a revolution. I go to bed every night disappointed but I’m back to work tomorrow, and that’s the only way you can do it.

Beginning to dismantle the Pentagon would save $1 trillion a year – a small government proposal if ever there was one.

It was Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Wendell Phillips – these were the people who made abolition real. Now, none of you guys is in favor of slavery, right?

One of the things that happened that I think is noteworthy, my parents were pretty tolerant people given their position in society.

I breathed the air of deliverance through books, and through books I leapt over the walls of confinement.

The world spends two trillion dollars a year on military, and of that two trillion the United States spends one trillion. We have a bigger military than the rest of the world put together. We have 150 foreign military bases.

If you read Martin Luther King speeches and sermons in the last two years of his life – you might want to – –when I read these to my students, they think it’s Malcom X because it’s so radical.

There was a sense of palpable relief that George [W.] Bush was leaving and that the Republicans had slipped back and that was a wonderful feeling.

Where’s the activism? Nobody knows. And anyone who thinks they know, like Todd Gitlin, has their head up their ass. Nobody knows.

Every relationship is an experiment and what one learns from it is so fascinating.

When [my dad] was at the University of Michigan, my mom was a social-worker. As he rose, he voted for [Adlai] Stevenson initially. Then he voted for [Dwight] Eisenhower. Then he kept voting Republican until he voted for Barack Obama.

Can we imagine a different world? I can. That’s a world where work is rational, it’s in the common good, and we’re actually producing real things rather than spinning our wheels in dreams of consumer heaven.

It’s not Lyndon Johnson who makes the black freedom movement; it’s the black freedom movement who makes Lyndon Johnson.

I don’t regret setting bombs.

I am always interested in the ways of scoring the sound of the poem, especially a poem with long lines.

I want to make sure people are constantly surprised and interested.

I’ve always been interested in films where you can identify with the actors.

It’s a repository for my brain, everything that I could possibly be interested in.

I’m interested in the limits of personality, in the possibility of change, and the saving power of art. Do powerful works of art raise our consciousness to such a degree that we refrain from sliding into moral hazard? Do we take note? Or are we doomed to repetition?

One that actually relates to all Latin American literature: that is, not every author is interested in being a representative of his or her national culture on the global stage.

I want to upset people, I want to make people think, I want to keep people interested.

I have a tendency get a little worked up. So I was interested in learning more about the complicated conflict and decided I would lend some of my time and energy to do so.