Your favorite virtue: Patience mixed with persistence are the virtues that will not allow a good idea to be abandoned.

Your favorite qualities in a man: Compassion, tenderness, and forgiveness

Your favorite qualities in a woman: Empathy, toughness, and short memory

What you appreciate the most in your friends: Willingness to offend me.

Your main fault: Phlegmatism

Your favorite occupation: The creative enterprise

Your idea of happiness: There is no such thing as happiness.

Your idea of misery: Living without brief glimpses of happiness.

If not yourself, who would you be? George Clooney or Michelle Obama

Where would you like to live? In a city where people are encouraged to fly their freak flags.

My favorite color: Black

Your favorite prose authors: John Irving, Walker Percy, Miss Manners

Your favorite poets: Jack White, Ezra Furman, Joni Mitchell

Your favorite heroes in fiction: Nick Carraway, Yossarian, Don Draper

Your favorite heroines in fiction: Jenny Fields, Brienne of Tarth, Leslie Knope

Your favorite painters and composers: Ben Shahn, Mark Rothko, Georgia O’Keefe (painters); Phillip Glass, Keith Richards, Mozart (composers)

Your heroes in real life: Arthur Ashe, Galileo, Benjamin Franklin

Your heroines in world history: Eleanor Roosevelt, Christa McAuliffe, Angela Davis

Your favorite names: Moon Unit Zappa, Shaquille O’Neal, Anna Karenina

What I hate the most: Hypocrisy

World history characters I hate the most: Bull Conner, Pope Pius XII, Joseph Goebbels

The military event I admire the most: None, other than the Battle of Waterloo, which spawned the great hit song by Abba

The reform I admire the most: 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

The natural talent I’d like to be gifted with: The talent to thrive without needing sleep

How I wish to die: Executed (painlessly) live on worldwide multimedia broadcast to save mankind from extermination by invading Martians

What is your present state of mind: Irrationally hopeful

For what fault have you most toleration? Youth

Your favorite motto: “Where there is a will, there is a way.”