Of course, each of us has to write our own book, live our own life.

In one of my favorite anecdotes about Foucault, someone asks him why he writes books. He responds by saying something like "When I begin to write a book, I do not know how it will come out, what it will say in the end. If I already did, I wouldn't need to write it."

As lovers of truth, we want to be close to it. Sometimes - evil thought, evil temptation - we want to be close to it by misleading others about its presence.

I worry that we don't currently have a democracy in the United States. Instead we have what [political philosopher] Sheldon Wolin has recently labeled a sort of inverted totalitarianism.

We can never leave loneliness behind completely - it is part of what forms us.

Usually, we think that "good" loneliness is what we call "solitude," the choice of some alone-time. But I want to press on with the negative dimension, to look at ways in which a fundamental sense of being separated from others shapes who we are and why.

None of us is perfect, but the point of our writing is to try to become better, to learn something that we may not have already realized, about ourselves, about the world we inhabit.