The common wisdom is that only about 1 percent of a novelist's research ends up in his or her book. In my experience, it's even less - closer to a tenth of a percent.
New York has arguably become the quintessential 1 percent city, a city that has been so given over to the rich that you now have to be rich to live here. Or not live here: New York's also a preferred destination for foreign money spent on vast, lifeless apartments in the sky that are occupied a couple of weeks a year at most.
As someone who came to New York in the 1970s, I was, like so many of my friends, a certified member of what we now call the 99 percent - and I was a lot closer to the bottom than to the top of that 99 percent. At some point during the intervening years, I moved into the 1 percent.
In America, the top 1 percent led the country into war and economic devastation, leaving the less fortunate to fight for one and pay for both.
I'm 21 years old, and it's kind of uncomfortable for me to talk about, but I'm in the 1 percent as far as my income and tax bracket. But now that I'm here, there's no amount of money you can wave in front of my face that will make me understand depriving people of human rights.
By 2015, the top 1 percent of families took home more than 20 percent of income. Wealth distribution was 10 times worse than that: the families in the top 1 percent owned as much as the families in the bottom 90 percent.
My first contract was in 1965. There were six of us in this band - my band before Deep Purple - six in the band plus management, and the entire royalty rate was three-fourths of 1 percent.
Civilizations may clash, but they surely fall if robbed of light from above. It could come from the 1 percent or the 99%, but a guiding light is needed to keep the United States from becoming the rubble of past great civilizations.
I obviously did not volunteer to go to Afghanistan solely to protect the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans.
In the last recession, 99 percent of us have lost wealth, but did you know that the top 1 percent increased their wealth five times? It tells you they create recessions so they get wealthier.
