The idea that something has to be a certain way is not American. There just wasn't a lot of compromising going on.

This is not about compromising convictions. This is about finding ways to work and live together as American citizens.

I don't think anything to do with who publishes the work matters at all, as long as they're not compromising to get published.

There's a certain amount of resonance about that idea.

A great idea is not enough.

Buffett was a billionaire who drove his own car, did his own taxes, and still lived in a home he had bought in 1958 for $31,500. He seemed to answer to a deeply rooted, distinctly American mythology, in which decency and common sense triumphed over cosmopolitan guile, and in which an idealized past held firm against a rootless and too hurriedly changing present.