Love perhaps includes the promise that when the mob comes for you I'll go against the mob.

I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was, and how flimsy its basis: a warm restaurant after having come in from the rain, the smell of food and wine, interesting conversation, daylight falling weakly on the polished cherrywood of the tables. It took so little to move the mood from one level to another, as one might push pieces on a chessboard. Even to be aware of this, in the midst of a happy moment, was to push one of those pieces, and to become slightly less happy.

It's an Obama book, certainly. I was delighted, and astonished, to hear recently that he was reading it. It's a book about a new kind of American reality, one that takes diversity for granted. It doesn't celebrate diversity, actually, it just says: this is how we live now.

The novelist can't successfully depict such horrifying reality. But she can, and must, try, to bear witness. There are many ways of doing this; the mode I prefer is indirect.

Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not villains of our own stories.

Killing a bunch of people in Sudan and Yemen and Pakistan, it's like, "Who cares - we don't know them." But the current discussion is framed as "When can the President kill an American citizen?" Now in my mind, killing a non-American citizen without due process is just as criminal as killing an American citizen without due process - but whatever gets us to the table to discuss this thing, we're going to take it.

The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.