Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.

Getting to the pint where the other is not the enemy is a big leap.

Volumptuous women look good. Ignorant messages from mass media tell women what size to be, but female qualities-a softness, a soothing capacity that a woman has no matter what size she happens to be-sustain the more humane aspects of civilization.

The discussion of ideas as opposed to the American narcissistic obsession with what's going on with the self, that's the general thing people are talking about.

Popular culture tells you that schools and parents don't know what's going on, the police are dogs, politicians are all liars and scum, and any crime that's not committed by the Mafia is done by the CIA.

Everybody has to be reminded that there's another way to be. Another more mysterious, unpredictable way to be that's not necessarily based upon contrivances.

I don't know any women who don't think about what they look like, and I don't know any men who don't think about what women look like.