When I first started working at MIT, back in the '80s, our writing department had a joint cocktail party with the Harvard writing department. It was kind of oil-and-water.

I think any writer keeps going back to some basic theme. Sometimes it's autobiographical. I guess it usually is.

One hopes that they'll never be able to use mind control weapons, because we're all done for if that happens. I don't want military people, or political people, to have that type of power over those of us who just get by from day to day.

Political art - not always a contradiction in terms - can destroy institutions, or eat away at them.

Future peace, prosperity and confidence depend not just on ourselves but on the success of all nations. Hence, we are all partners, no matter what our backgrounds, cultures, faiths and histories.

There was one thing more than any other that turned this New York, liberal, Jewish, Columbia University graduate student away from modern liberalism: its use of moral equivalence to avoid confronting evil during the Cold War.

There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

Like its politicians and its war, society has the teenagers it deserves.