I would care less about what people thought of me.

Convince myself that walking two miles a day isn’t boring.

I would love to have a good memory. I’m at an age when remembering something right away is as good as an orgasm.

I would erase my fear of dying, but I suppose that would be erasing some of my human condition.

That’s the book I hope to get written sometime in the next ten years.

I wrote it because it was so. Because it was the force of my experience that pushed the book out of me, like a baby is pushed out of its mother. The mother doesn’t say, “I’ll push this one out for my friends.” You push the book out because you’ve got to – as you push out the baby.

I still think the greatest gift you can give your kids is easy exposure to interesting things. Not compelling them to go see things, but making them feel that art and literature are just parts of the world

Well, it certainly influences my manner of writing, because I always see Darwin as a model of the act of explanation and of argument; the morality, the ethics of explanation, maybe.

I’ve been devoting a lot of my time in the last five years to musical theater. It’s been my new passion. I’d love to write a musical comedy about Eleanor of Aquitaine and the troubadours. I’ve always thought that would make a wonderful musical, about a troubadour who falls in love with a beautiful queen.

My very wise and politically savvy 17-year-old daughter says I get too emotional about political issues. I think she’s right. She knows that if she sees me race across a room, I have just read something about Trump. Turning ideas into feelings is the thing an essayist is supposed to do, but political punditry should probably be more detached.