Japanese naval officers in dress whites are frequent guests at Pearl Harbor's officers' mess and are very polite. They always were. Except, of course, for that little interval there between 1941 and 1945.

He [Gen. Douglas MacArthur] was a great thundering paradox of a man, noble and ignoble, inspiring and outrageous, arrogant and shy, the best of men and the worst of men, the most protean, most ridiculous, and most sublime.

But there are no loners. No man lives in a void. His every act is conditioned by his time and his society.

They fought on with a devotion which would puzzle the generation of the 1980s. More surprising, in many instances it would have baffled the men they themselves were before Pearl Harbor. Among MacArthur's ardent infantrymen were cooks, mechanics, pilots whose planes had been shot down, seamen whose ships had been sunk, and some civilian volunteers.

I try to be as ruthless as possible. I ask myself of each sentence, "Is it clear? Is it true? Does it feel good?" And if it's not, then I rewrite it.

The sum of a million facts is not the truth.

I realized that the worst thing that could happen to me was about to happen to me.