Governments are different, and philosophies are different, but when it comes down to it, a schoolteacher is a schoolteacher is a schoolteacher. A butcher is a butcher is a butcher. We are people. And we are far more common than we ever imagine.

I love comedy. I love the absurdity of it. I love the kind of intelligence that's required to be dumb in comedy.

I was 15 when Chernobyl happened, I've been vaguely thinking about it for most of my life. But somewhere around 2015, it occurred to me that I didn't know how it happened, which seemed like a pretty bizarre lapse in my understanding of the world and how it functions.

In the case of 'Chernobyl,' we're telling a story of a government that runs on lies the way cars run on fuel, and there are people who ultimately end up paying the price for those lies - and a certain culture of denial is in place, and the degradation of expertise is in place.

This idea that a book can either be about character and feeling, or about politics and idea, is just a false binary. Ideas are an expression of the feelings and the intense emotions we hold about the world.

I always believed in burning up the government's political capital, not being Mr Safe Guy, you know?

There's a viewpoint that says, 'I can fight for minorities, and I can fight for women,' and if you get that, you make up a vast majority of the voting block, and you win. And white males have been left aside a little bit in the politics of who speaks to them.

The greatest blessing of our democracy is freedom. But in the last analysis, our only freedom is the freedom to discipline ourselves.