Perhaps history and distance and time enable us to face things that nobody particularly wanted to look at at the time, but it's very important that all of this be known. How did this happen?

This administration has taken us into the largest fiscal deficit in our history. The dollar is at an all-time low, and 3 million people lost their jobs,

At graduation, I assumed I'd be in publishing, but first I went to England and got a master's degree in English Literature. And then I came back to New York and had a series of publishing jobs, the way one does.

Having written about a place that was utterly destroyed, it struck me as interesting to look at a place that had come through the war almost literally unscathed, ... I thought, 'And yet and yet and yet ... Does any place [really] come out unscathed?'

Venice was always one step removed from what was going on. If you were in Turin or in Milan or one of the industrial centers, you would have had a much more active political constituency. Venice essentially lived for itself.

This must be I guess the most extreme form of unintended consequence, but it seemed to me a great metaphor for things that happen all the time.