No one extraordinary appears to be entirely contemporary. People who are contemporary don’t appear at all: they are invisible. - Susan Sontag

But the past is the biggest country of all, and there's a reason one gives in to the desire to set stories in the past: almost everything good seems located in the past, perhaps that's an illusion, but I feel nostalgic for every era before I was born; and one is freer of modern inhibitions, perhaps because one bears no responsibility for the past, sometimes I feel simply ashamed of the time in which I live.

I know I’m not myself with people, but am I myself when alone? That seems unlikely, too.

Americans have it right. Europeans are not in an evangelical — or a bellicose — mood. Indeed, sometimes I have to pinch myself to be sure I am not dreaming: that what many people in my own country now hold against Germany, which wreaked such horrors on the world for nearly a century — the new "German problem," as it were — is that Germans are repelled by war; that much of German public opinion is now virtually ... pacifist!