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

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.

When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.

A bee rose up from a sun-filled paper cup, off to make slum honey from some diet root beer it had found inside.

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.

I am closer to the pacifist side, in that I think that the British response to German aggression, which was to try to starve the Continent into a state of revolt and to terrorize German civilians with bombing raids, was part of the total catastrophe.

Updike was the first to take the penile sensorium under the wing of elaborate metaphorical prose.