This is the great crisis in Western culture; there's nothing comparable to it. How it could have happened, the level of responsibility that people take for it, I think, is still the great issue.

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.

One of the things that's always interested me, from the first book on, is unintended consequences,