All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that th… - Susan Sontag

The Bush administration has committed the country to a new, pseudo-religious doctrine of war, endless war — for "the war on terror" is nothing less than that.

Literature is dialogue; responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another. Writers can do something to combat these clichés of our separateness, our difference — for writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences — experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.

Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power are always an index of how much is not understood about a disease.