You're only good if you can do bad and decide not to.

Something will be there when the flood recedes. We know that. It will be those people now standing in the water, and on those rooftops - many black, many poor. Homeless. Overlooked. And it will be New Orleans - though its memory may be shortened, its self-gaze and eccentricity scoured out so that what's left is a city more like other cities, less insular, less self-regarding, but possibly more self-knowing after today. A city on firmer ground.

Any rainy summer morning, of course, has the seeds of gloomy alienation sown in. But a rainy summer morning far from home - when your personal clouds don't move but hang - can easily produce the feeling of the world as seen from the grave. This I know.

I didn't feel up to writing about 9/11. If I were to write about it, it would take me years.

The ways in which things are superficially similar but also distinct is interesting to me.

A reader is entitled to believe what he or she believes is consonant with the facts of the book. It is not unusual that readers take away something that is spiritually at variance from what I myself experienced. That's not to say readers make up the book they want. We all have to agree on the facts. But readers bring their histories and all sets of longings. A book will pluck the strings of those longings differently among different readers.

Very early you come to the realization that nothing will ever take you away from yourself.