Historians advised us not to select too recent events. They felt, and we agreed, that you need time to pass before you have the kind of historical perspective that we wanted to reflect in these hours.

We didn't want to come up with a Top 10 list or a countdown. The History Channel is not going to tell the world what the 10 most important days are. That's not what this is about.

The laws in existence at the time these events occurred do not permit us to initiate criminal charges,

Canceled checks will be to future historians and cultural anthropologists what the Dead Sea Scrolls and hieroglyphics are to us.

Perhaps it is our perennial fate to be surprised by the simultaneity of events, by the sheer extension of the world in time and space. That we are here, prosperous, safe, unlikely to go to bed hungry or be blown to pieces this evening, while elsewhere in the world, right now in Grozny, in Najaf, in the Sudan, in the Congo, in Gaza, in the favelas of Rio....To be a traveler—and novelists are often travelers—is to be constantly reminded of the simultaneity of what is going on in the world, your world and the very different world you have visited and from which you have returned home.

An event in the present evokes past sensations. But science couldn't explain how a foolish heart had the power to overrule common sense.