All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.

One of the things that got me on this topic for this book was that when I was researching the column I wrote in 2009 saying that I was stepping down from my column at "Newsweek" because I wanted to make room for newer, fresh voices out there, I discovered that in the year I was born, 1952, the average life expectancy of an American was 68. I was shocked by that figure and every time I mention it I hear a gasp from somebody in the crowd. Now, of course, we're more or less at 80, so that means that we've gotten 12 additional years.

There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.

Look at the view and you'll never be disappointed.

I'm boggled by the idea of being an only child. I know nothing at all (I'm happy to say) about having had a cold and withholding mother, about being divorced. The more I've been writing novels, each novel I've written has become successively less grounded in anything approaching autobiography.

And a great misunderstanding is that children think their parents are grown-up, and parents feel obliged to act as if they were.

Kids and violent TV, violent TV and violence, violence and kids. The only people missing from this discussion are the parents. Where are we? Gone. Abdicated.