Let the truth take care of itself, I decided. It's done all right on its own so far.

The issue of torture, connected to American soldiers, is not somewhere most people want to linger. We may not want to confront this issue so much in the U.S. because of how we want to think about our veterans. There's the sense that we want to think of our veterans as - if they're damaged, damaged by something glamorous, like a firefight.

Motivations are too tangled and complex.

The way I feel about every book is this: you don't finish it, you abandon it. All of my books have in some sense failed, otherwise I wouldn't write another one. If I wrote the perfect book, I wouldn't have to write again, and I wouldn't want to. That's not true for everyone, but it's true for me. I could walk away then. But so far I haven't managed to do it.

Choose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist.

Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.

Let the truth take care of itself, I decided. It's done all right on its own so far.