You don't bring in a gay character as a way of commenting on gay issues. You have one there because he's real, and that's his life, no less so than your life is yours.

Things don't go away just because you choose to forget them.

There was a feeling during the years of George W. Bushs presidency that his gracelessness as well as his appetite for war were linked to his impatience with complexity. He acted from the gut, and was economical with the truth until it disappeared.

A MOB is not, as is so often said, mindless. A MOB is single-minded.

The novelist loses, every time. Politics is insidious, the modern conduct of war (from shoulder-launched rockets to drone strikes) is insidious. Someone presses a button in California and twenty people are incinerated at a wedding in Pakistan. The killer is spared the sight of the corpses.

For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with apt words.

But a book suggests conversation: one person is speaking to another, and audible sound is, or should be, natural to that exchange. So I read aloud with myself as the audience, and gave voice to another's words.