Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon.

You need to find a way to live your life, that it doesn't make a mockery of your values.

We were very excited and we brought speakers in – then it so happened that there was a marine recruiter in the center of campus and one of our brothers, one SDS person put up a sign with a quote from the Nuremberg trial and an arrow point at the marine recruiter, saying, "This man is a war criminal." My younger brother and I, he was freshman and I was a sophomore, got caught up in the debates that were swirling around the center of campus and the young Trotskyists had put out a fact sheet on Vietnam that was phenomenal.

Fairly apolitical. Kind of aspiring to participate in life. I'm 18-19 years old. Wanting to dive into the world and finding the world opening for me in ways that were unimaginable. I didn't sleep for the whole first year at university because it was too much going on. Too many films to see, too many concerts to go to.

I don't think saying "I was wrong here, I was wrong there" absolves you of anything particularly, nor does it get you into heaven.

One of the things that's complicated about writing anything is that it's an act of narcissism, and then of course once it sails out into the world, you have to let go of it.

I suffer from a genetic flaw, which is that my mother was a hopeless Pollyanna.