To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.

Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die.

In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.

Radio - and perhaps airplanes, and then of course, the atom bomb - was the preeminent technology of the first half of the 20th century. It was how the Third Reich controlled its citizens, spread lies, and disseminated fear.

I guess whatever maturity is there may be there because I've been keeping a journal forever. In high school my friends would make fun of me - you're doing your man diary again. So I was always trying to translate experience into words.

Travel definitely affects me as a writer.

I write reviews of science books for the Boston Globe, so I like to give science books.