The Best Thing We Can Bring To

What Concerns Me Most Is The Horrible Degradation Our Notions Of Truth, Civility, And Decency Have Undergone. Also The Way That Language Has Been Malformed - We Have Been Overcome With Banality And The Cynical Misuse Of Language. When A Candidate Runs A Campaign On A Series Of Dog-whistles To Bigots, Then Turns Around And Talks About "healing The Wounds Of Division," That Is Right Out Of Orwell.

I Try To Keep My Artistic Opinions Not So Much "to Myself" But "on Myself."

I Don't Know About Transformation. But Scientifically You Can Say: Well, It Doesn't Seem To Hurt Anybody. Personally I've Been Cheered By Books At Really Critical Moments. That Much I Believe.

Maybe You Could Even Think 100,000 People Are Inside Each Human Being. And You Drop A Novel On That Person, And A Certain Number Of Those Sub-people Come Alive Or Get Reenergized For Some Finite Time.

Being In Church So Often, Spending Those Hours Sitting In Front Of A Highly Symbolic Array Of Objects, Hearing Those Beautiful Texts - It Teaches A Kid That There Are Important Truths Beyond The Literal Ones, And That We Have Ways To Access Those Truths That Are, Let's Say, Super-rational.