In searching for a way out of my own troubles, I had found my way into the troubles of others, some long gone, and now I was trying to find my way back out, through their troubles, as if we human beings can ever learn from one another.

If Americans are to read something that is difficult, they will only do so supposing they will be admired for having done it.

Clarity is the most important thing to me - in thinking - and so I try in the books to be as clear as possible.

It is at the heart of our human enterprise, that is to say, at the heart of society, to allow consensus a power it ought not to have.

One can't say how one behaved or why, really. Such situations, they are far more complex than any either/or proposition. It is simplistic to produce events in pairs and lean them against each other like cards. I suppose if you a playing go or shogi, then such a thing might be helpful, but that is not life.

The books turn out to be about things afterwards. I don't go into them with concepts, for the most part.

…There are times when something is asked of us, and we find we must do it. There is no calculation involved, no measure of the necessity of the thing itself, the action that must be performed. There is simply an acknowledgment that we will do the thing in question, and then the thing is done, often at considerable personal cost. " "What goes into these decisions? What tiny factors, invisible, in the jutting edges of personality and circumstance, contribute to this inevitability?