How many of the people I know - sons and daughters - have intricate abstract expressionist paintings of their mothers, created out of their own emotions, attitudes, hands. And how many have only Polaroid pictures of their fathers.

we have made an extraordinary transition. From moral absolutes to moral relativism. ... Moral problems become medical ones and yesterday's sinners become today's patients.

Today, much of journalism and politics are in a kind of collusion to oversimplify and personalize issues. No room for ambivalence. Plenty of room for the personal attack.

I wonder whether our adoption of Shrink-ese as a second language, the move from religious phrases of judgment to secular words of acceptance, hasn't also produced a moral lobotomy. In the reluctance, the aversion to being judgmental, are we disabled from making any judgments at all?

Saving time, it seems, has a primacy that's too rarely examined.

Maybe at 20 you can write well, but I don't think you could do what I do. Some things have to happen to you first.

We continually want to unmask our heroes as if there were more to be learned from their nakedness than from their choice of clothing.