Public libraries are the sole community centers left in America. The degree to which a branch of the local library is connected to the larger culture is a reflection of the degree to which the community itself is connected to the larger culture.

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.

The United States particularly abandoned Liberia after the end of the Cold War.

Motivations are too tangled and complex.

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

And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.

Boys like it when you talk to them as if they were grown men—at least he always did when he was a kid—because they pretend that’s what they are anyhow, grown-up men, and they do it for their entire lives.