In the late fifties, early sixties, I was aware that there was this culture of people who were trying to think about a whole range of social justice issues more or less out of the mainstream. Lawrence Ferlinghetti starting the Journal for the Protection of All Beings, the essays of James Baldwin, Whole Earth Catalog, experimental institutions like Black Mountain. A writer who was very important to me for thinking about politics in those years was Paul Goodman. I met him when he came to Stanford. We were talking about researching the power structure and how we were going to confront the military-industrial complex, and he kind of said, Whoa whoa whoa, slow down. Here’s the thing, figure out what you love doing and try to find a way to do it, and if you find that the structures of institutions around you keep you from doing it in the way that’s valuable to you, there’s where you work on changing the structures. If to be an actor you have to survive doing degrading commercials, figure out how to change that system. Maybe it’s government support of the arts, maybe it’s something else. If you’re a scientist and you can’t do the kind of science you want to because of the money, that’s where you try to make change.

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I remember listening to Terry Gross interviewing Philip Roth, and she asked what it takes to be an artist. He said there were two things, to his mind. A deep appetite for play, and a moral stake in the world. I thought, That sounds right to me.