One of the historians here in Williamsburg talked about War and Peace. I had to read that in school. It was an inspiring, lengthy treatise. I read it twice. It taught me a lot about life. There was a marvelous book by Salinger called Catcher in the Rye. There was a book about discrimination called Gentleman's Agreement. These books I think helped shape my life. But to be honest with you, not one book stands out as the defining book for me.

I remember the awakening that occurred in me when I read, for the first time, Franz Kafka. ... That morning I was happy. I wanted to run out and embrace them, all these garbage collectors, because they taught me that there was another world than the world of Kafka, which is absurd and desperate, and despairing.

some of the most noteworthy books I’ve read I guess, like A People’s History of the US, the Howard Zinn book totally changed the way I look at politics. And then in the same way I read a book recently called Sacred Economics that like totally changed the way I looked at economics.

I think fiction is very important because it gets us into the mind of a person. Hamlet is a tremendous piece of literature. You know Hamlet better than you know most real people. Do you know the reason? Because you know what he’s thinking. And this teaches you that every human has an integrity and an autonomy and a spirituality of his own, of her own, and great literature can teach you that.

One of my mentors, Tom Frank, a professor of law at NYU, he was really instrumental in making me understand that we need to look at the global picture, and we always need to not take anything for granted, but go very much through a process of critical thinking before we formulate our views. So he was, I think, instrumental in shaping my views as to how to pursue my career in the future.

Well, I think the most single important issue today is to make sure that nuclear weapons will not proliferate beyond the eight, or nine, countries that already have nuclear weapons; and absolutely make sure that none of these nuclear weapons or this nuclear material will fall into the hands of any extremist or terrorist group, because if they got hold of this material, they would use it. That would be the beginning of the end for civilisation as we know it.

No. Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked out quite that way. At that time, everybody was euphoric that we will have a new world order, you know, a world order that does not rely on nuclear weapons, nuclear deterrence. Unfortunately, it didn’t work that way. ... We still have thousands of warheads in existence. We still have more than 20 — 30 countries relying on nuclear deterrence for their own survival.

For them, home is the world. For them, every human being is just one member of that large human family you have. ... if we have more children like mine, in my view, we will not have war.

First of all, you learn to manage stress. You learn to live with stress. I mean, stress is there all the time. There’s no question about it. It’s in the morning. It’s at night. It’s at 3:00 in the morning, but you need to learn how to manage stress. Sometimes it’s more difficult than others, but you try to distract yourself. Whenever I have the chance, I like to go and have a round of golf. I have a passion for modern art. I have a passion for antique carpets, classical music. To me, these are distractions, and sometimes my wife, she think I’m obsessed with these little things, but I tell her it is my way of distracting myself from just constantly continuing about my work. But the stress is there. But sometimes, the euphoria you get from a sense of achievement in many ways compensates all the stress you had for a year or two.

Unfortunately, I don’t. My wife now reads fiction. I don’t have the time to read fiction. My wife reads the fiction and summarizes it to me, but I wish at one point I’ll have time again to read fiction. It is a luxury I cannot afford right now.