After college, I spent a decade working the kinds of jobs that I write about - bartender, shoe salesman, kitchen man - while voraciously reading novels.

I'm forever grateful to have had the opportunity to prove myself to my dad. After I took over the diner, the look in my father's eyes went from disappointment to respect.

I'm proudly a crime writer, but it would be really inaccurate to call me a mystery writer.

I was really rudderless at one point my life. And once I started reading books, then I got the idea that maybe I could become a writer. I had a goal. And every day when I got up, there was a reason.

I'm a very sentimental, emotional person.

I get chills when I think that there's a statue of Phil Lynott on a street in Dublin, that people leave flowers by the statue. I love stuff like that.

In its rather clinical view of death, 'True Grit' rivals the hardboiled world of 'Red Harvest'-era Dashiell Hammett and prefigures Cormac McCarthy by 20 years.

American wars in Muslim countries created some extremists and inflamed many more while producing a security vacuum that allowed them to wreak mayhem.

By the fall of 2007, my last remaining Iraqi friend in Baghdad had left. Once he was gone, my connection to the country and the war began to thin, even as the terror diminished. I missed the improvement that came with the surge, and so, in my nervous system, I never quite registered it.

Pay attention to other people's nightmares because they might be contagious.

Over the years, America had become more like Wal-Mart. It had gotten cheap. Prices were lower, and wages were lower. There were fewer union factory jobs and more part-time jobs as greeters.

The phrase 'change the world' is tossed around Silicon Valley conversations and business plans as freely as talk of 'early-stage investing' and 'beta tests.'

A curious thing about this rarefied world is that bloggers are almost unfailingly contemptuous toward everyone except one another.

The constellation of opinion called the blogosphere consists, like the stars themselves, partly of gases. This is what makes blogs addictive - that is, both pleasurable and destructive: They're so easy to consume and so endlessly available.

Part of the mystique of blogs is their protean quality: They work both sides of the divide between politics and media, further blurring the already fuzzy distinctions between reporter, pundit, political operative, activist, and citizen.

Together, Apple and Walmart represent the intense separation of American life into blue and red, rich and poor, overpriced and undersold, hyperconnected and left behind.

I worked as a carpenter for a few years. I began writing. I wrote a book about my time in Africa - that came out in 1988 - called 'The Village of Waiting.'

The difference between a reporter, a newspaper columnist, a paid speaker, a television personality, a radio talk show host, a blogger, a movie producer, a publicist, and a political strategist, is growing less - and not more - distinct.

The war in Afghanistan is not of a peace with the rest of Obama's worldview. It's a holdover from the era that his election was supposed to bring to a close.

Last year, in the year 2008, it just became normal to watch great American institutions crumble, almost dissolve like sand.

I need to protect myself from my own addictive impulse.

I spend much too much time on the Web with e-mail and surfing and reading my key sites, and a whole day can go by, and you wonder, 'What did I do today?'

Americans almost never elect presidents on the basis of foreign policy.

The best example of Obama's success in foreign policy is Iran.