It's the feeling right from the beginning that the government is not on your side, the government thinks you're going to use this opportunity to cheat them, even though you've just been through this huge trauma.

I have to admit that I was terrified of ending the book, precisely because I go around saying about pretty much every book I read, "It fell apart at the end." I have friends who are waiting to ridicule me forever.

But I think the goal of all these attacks is the same, which is to seize maximum media attention. Maybe some of these attacks were meant to be small. Some of them might have been failed larger attacks. And some of them are just part of a new strategy of doing lots of tiny attacks, as opposed to one large one.

I also think that there's something about the graphic, political nature of such attacks, mixed with the fact that it all seems completely random to the victims.

America going into this huge, costly, never-ending war created huge debt, which became a huge problem in Congress and led to it stalling many times, putting a halt to different kinds of social progress.

Literature has become too psychological. We discount the physical, when in fact much of life is physical. People's personalities are partly formed by, or in response to, how they take up space; the physical mask has some relation, howsoever obscure, to the mental work happening underneath.

You can say that a small attack is one in which relatively few people die, but the minute you say that, you can sense the ironies in that statement. A blast in which five people are killed is a meaningful blast.