Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

I still believe in the American Dream. I see it in terms of freedom, and a government that trusts its people to exercise freedom, that this is not a government that allows you to give, that allows you to explore, and doesn't dampen your own creativity - in the broadest sense - with a lot of dictums or dogmas or restraints. So, insofar as we can remain a free country that allows for the interplay of personal energies. I think this is still a country that is not only working towards a dream, but actually is the dream in action.

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

From the standpoint of a Middle Eastern citizen, Americans look like a bully forcing our way of life on the Islamic way of life. The notion of purity is very important in Islam, and a lot of the negative warlike actions taken against us have to do with our physical presence in the Middle East. Osama bin Laden was trying to get the American, or protesting the American military presence in Saudi Arabia. It's not surprising that our strong presence in Iraq has produced a wave of resistance anger, extreme anger in some cases, and a permissive atmosphere that allows these people to go undetected.

I write about, more or less, everything I can think of, that is I stretch my imagination as far as it'll go. I am kind of stuck in the middle as far as my life goes, and hence my imagination tends to zero in on things which are indeed in the middle. That is, I don't write about the very rich, who I scarcely know, or the very poor who I don't know very well either.