It's my policy not to review funerals.

I thought a lot about Nixon's personal history and the changes in America during his lifetime and tried to craft stories, which I thought reflected some of his personal history but also the backdrop of a changing America. Nixon grew up in a strict Quaker family. The idea of the American Dream, of hard work and not much fun, was ingrained in Nixon as a child, but curiously so was a love of music. Nixon himself was a pretty good piano player. So it's the contradictions that interest me, as I think we all have them.

My mind leaps to my theory about presidents - that there are two kinds, ones who have a lot of sex and the others who start wars. In short - and don't quote me, because this is an incomplete expression of a more complex premise - I believe blow jobs prevent war.

I'm nothing you can catch now. I am black powder, I am singe, I am the bomb that bursts the night.

I'm feeling how profoundly my family disappointed me and in the end how I retreated, how I became nothing, because that was much less risky than attempting to be something, to be anything in the face of such contempt.

I liked the fact she understood how we all have little secret habits that seem normal enough to us, but which we know better than to mention out loud.

Was this the big one or was this the small tremor, the warning? Does it get better - does the sensation of being in a dream underwater go away?