Writing has to do with truth-telling. When you're writing, let's say, an essay for a magazine, you try to tell the truth at every moment. You do your best to quote people accurately and get everything right. Writing a novel is a break from that: freedom. When you're writing a novel, you are in charge; you can beef things up.

The great thing about novels is that you can be as unshy as you want to be. I'm very polite in person. I don't want to talk about startling or upsetting things with people.

Of course, individuals are responsible for individual actions - the pilots who flew over Pearl Harbor and dropped bombs on those ships did a terrible thing as part of an attack on a military base.

I keep thinking I'll enjoy suspense novels, and sometimes I do. I've read about 20 Dick Francis novels.

I wanted to apprentice myself to the dailiness of the war's beginning phase. It's truer and more frightening that way - when you're afloat on a little dingy in the midst of it all.

The equivocations, the confusions, the contradictions. There's no way we can live through or comprehend something so big that happened so long ago. We've lost true history. But if we are willing to tolerate the contradictions, and if we suffer through events rather than ticking them off, we may at least get closer to understanding what happened than if we grip the handrail of a carefully polished and reassuringly heroic narrative.

There is no good word for stomach; just as there is no good word for girlfriend. Stomach is to girlfriend as belly is to lover, and as abdomen is to consort, and as middle is to petite amie.