The Quarantine Tapes

“Books are immortal and they allow you to have this thing that none of us can actually have, which is an immortality and indelibility that books do have. That’s why I think, ultimately, it’s a very optimistic gesture to write a book or to record a story or to commit to paper a memory or observation. I think there’s this optimism that this will last and people will be able to experience this.”

“I thought it was very important for the ACLU to be in strong solidarity with the leadership of Black Lives Matter and other organizations, and we will take our cues from them.”

“I feel that George Floyd’s killing, and all of the events that have followed, remind us that there is this terrible violence and distortion around which we have wrapped our lives and our society, and that we cannot transform or remake the world without going through this reckoning of our racial reality.”

“I hope [this moment] is a portal to policy change. I hope that we’re really at the beginning of radically transforming this country, that Americans are indeed serious about building equity and justice. That’s what I’m hoping. And I think in order for that to happen, we have to ensure that we’re transforming policy and we’re even transforming power.”

“I think what this pandemic has done is to expose years, sometimes decades, of social inequities.”

“Life goes on. The pandemic is not a pause, it’s a crucible. We move through it as we move through anything. Our lives go on. We’re continuing to engage, we’re continuing to have to deal with whatever we’re dealing with in our personal relationships. We’re not putting our lives on hold for six months, or one year, or two years, but figuring out how to navigate our lives in this period, with this set of conditions.”

“In America, there’s a really powerful attempt by the people who control wealth, who also control the media, to distract us from what’s best for us, to distract us from democracy, to distract us from where we sit inside the culture.”

“Whenever I say, ‘I want to be a director’ or ‘I want to write’, all these people say, ‘Oh, why don’t you write about your husband or your boyfriend’ or something. It doesn’t interest me. That’s not my muse. I want to write about animals. I feel like I am an environmental artist, my muse is the environment, it’s nature, it’s mostly animals.”

“I just hope that people sustain this energy and recognize that this is not something that you do just today. This is not something that you do just this week. You should always be reading diverse things, not only in terms of demographics, but in terms of aesthetics and ideology. I hope that we can see that happen.”

“I can tell you that the need for intimacy, and some form of companionship, and to be seen and understood is just as powerful as the need to be separate.”