The rottenness of politics in Yugoslavia didn't come as a surprise. The main lesson is that this is a war which could have easily been stopped by Europe. What was lacking was any will to do so. It's an irony of the achievement of Europe that it had lived for 40 years under the assumption of the unimaginability of internal wars, so it didn't know what to do with it when it was confronted with one close up.

Reality is a powerful solvent.

I've lost count of the interviews I've done about my illness and its relationship to my ideas and writing.

Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.

Undergraduates today can select from a swathe of identity studies.... The shortcoming of all these para-academic programs is not that they concentrate on a given ethnic or geographical minority; it is that they encourage members of that minority to study themselves - thereby simultaneously negating the goals of a liberal education and reinforcing the sectarian and ghetto mentalities they purport to undermine.

I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.

Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.