Obama has presided over sweeping cultural advances, particularly in the rights of gay and lesbian Americans.

Trump's cabinet picks seem designed to unwind government itself, leaving the average citizen completely exposed and vulnerable to full exploitation by corporate interests.

Trump is a big businessman. He's your boss or CEO, not one of your brothers on the line.

It sounds terribly cynical, but the real surprise in the Philando Castile case is not that the officer was acquitted but that he was charged at all. The prosecutors in the case deserve great credit for even trying. But no one should be shocked about how it turned out.

The Trumps have spent exactly zero percent of their lives caring about anyone other than themselves.

Trump is reviled around the world.

Popularity has always been the key currency in choosing a president.

What stalwart Republican would stop Trump from profiteering for his businesses from the White House the way he's gamed his companies and the tax code for decades, or prevent him from letting his adult children milk their father's position to benefit his supposed 'blind trust?'

Trump is an erratic figure - seemingly fragile, consumed by his own unpopularity and desperate to somehow exceed Barack Obama in public acclaim.

Wakanda, in short, is the Africa of black dreams.

A major loss by a Democratic prosecutor at the hands of the BLM movement could alter the political landscape in a way that might actually change the way prosecutors, and ultimately police departments, operate.

To be white in America is to assume, with total self-confidence and little afterthought, the personal ownership of public spaces.

Trump channeled ethno-populist rage as naturally and charismatically as George Wallace had during the 1960s, while seating a billionaire cabinet.

In fundamental ways, the 2016 Democratic primary has been a litigation of the Obama years, and of whether the president's 2008 campaign vow of 'change we can believe in' succeeded or failed.

To be sure, police do a dangerous job and take tremendous personal risks to safeguard the public. Most officers just want to do their jobs and go home alive.

Trump's real Achilles heel, and the thing most likely to keep him out of the White House, is his brazen contempt for women (plus his lack of impulse control and inability to stay off his Android phone).

The one woman Trump does seem to totally respect is his daughter from his first marriage, Ivanka, on whom he heaps constant, effusive, at-times borderline creepy praise and physical affection.

Trump's trade and immigration policies will deliver an economic shock to states like Texas where trade produces a substantial share of the jobs, and which depend on high oil prices.

Trump is beset by clear and alarming conflicts between his international business concerns and the national interest.

Trump built Trump Tower using mob concrete, not Bethlehem steel.

The Hollywood of Frank Capra's era, when Reagan became a minor star, sold the world an image of American pith and patriotism in many ways as defining as the moon landing or the A-bomb.

Our love of Hollywood-style glamour helped elect two presidents: JFK and Reagan, who fulfilled the prophecy that a country so enamored of actors would eventually make one their president.

It is uncomfortable in the extreme for people, and particularly for members of the press, to confront the notion that a president could be so far outside the bounds of tradition that he must be treated differently from his predecessors.

Republicans don't vote Republican because of Nancy Pelosi. They vote Republican because they are Republicans.

The criminal justice system in the United States is designed to do two things really well: to railroad black and brown bodies into prison, and to keep police officers out of it.

Protest is, at its core, designed to move policy.

The presidency is, in many ways, America's comment on itself; our collective national costume. In the occupant of our sole nationwide elected office, we see who we think we are, or who we want to be.

Trump is, in every way, the anti-Obama.

Hillary Clinton's time in the Senate indicates she is happier being a policy workhorse than a show horse.

America after Trump may be more like the European Union; a rambling alliance of interstate compacts, rather than the forced marriage of a country that emerged after the Civil War.

Trump is reviled around the world, as is the U.S. under his leadership.

To be sure, the Trump administration is shot through with corruption.

Nothing is accidental in the universe - this is one of my Laws of Physics - except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way.

We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.

For some reason, voters can be brainwashed, and they vote sometimes against their own best interests, let alone voting against the interests of people who need them, like people who are disenfranchised and people who are poor and so forth.

Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

I wrote a novel called 'Blonde,' which is about Norma Jean Baker, who becomes Marilyn Monroe, which I called a fictitious biography. That uses the material as if it were myth - that Marilyn Monroe is like this mythical figure in our culture.

If my favorite, most comfortable place is by our fireplace in cold weather, expedient places are on an airplane, in a waiting room or even waiting in line; frequently these days, while on the phone having been 'put on hold.'

My theory is that literature is essential to society in the way that dreams are essential to our lives. We can't live without dreaming - as we can't live without sleep. We are 'conscious' beings for only a limited period of time, then we sink back into sleep - the 'unconscious.' It is nourishing, in ways we can't fully understand.

I don't think I'm morbid by nature. Serious writers have always written about serious subjects. Lighthearted material doesn't appeal to me, and I don't read it. I think I'm a realist, with a realistic sensibility of history and the tragedy of history.

In love there are two things - bodies and words.

I consider tragedy the highest form of art.

'A Fair Maiden' existed in notes and sketches for perhaps a year. When I traveled, I would take along with me my folder of notes - 'ideas for stories.' Eventually, I began to write it and wrote it fairly swiftly - in perhaps two months of fairly intense writing and rewriting. Most of my time writing is really re-writing.

Love is an indescribable sensation - perhaps a conviction, a sense of certitude.

When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.

I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency.

Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.