Social media is not the same in 2013 as it was in 2003 - or even 2008 or 2011. You didn't carry around AOL chat in your pocket or look at it when you were in class.
Whenever you have dynamic interactions between 300 million people and the American economy acting in really complex ways, that introduces a degree of almost chaos theory to the system, in a literal sense.
The destruction of civilian hamlets, the killing and the wounding of civilians, became vastly greater than it had been before, and it was very upsetting; but I still couldn't bring myself to understand that the policy itself was wrong.
That was the crux. You. Only you could work on you. Nobody could force you, and if you weren't ready, then you weren't ready, and no amount of open-armed encouragement was going to change that.
I have used Lenovo since I wrote my first novel. My old laptop broke, so I bought a new one, but still a Lenovo. It is one of my most essential devices.
I'd like to say from the beginning that the 12 years I've been coming here, I've met unfailing courtesy and cooperation, courtesy from your people and cooperation from the Ministry of Information.
The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den.
If you tailor your news viewing so that you only get one point of view, well of course you're going to think somebody else has got a different point of view, and it may be wrong.
How it is that within 60 days of a general election issue, groups can no longer tell voters that a Member of Congress votes pro-abortion, against guns, against the environment or whatever else is beyond me.
The rhetoric on the Hill is getting very heated and it's getting quite dangerous. The gun is at the head of the American economy and Congress is holding it and its got a hair trigger. We've got to pay our bills.
There are pop managers, and then there's Simon Cowell, who isn't gay, Jewish or particularly riveting. He's not without interest but he doesn't exactly have the hinterland of, say, Brian Epstein.
Decorators never quite saw the point of massing books. Books brought colour to a room and filled it up, but shelves bearing just one thing struck them as a decorative display opportunity tragically lost.
Real writers - serious writers with serious subjects, who earn their living at it - all seem to write in small rooms with that knotty-pine 1974 look on the top-floor rear of their houses. Rooms with views.
Stephen Jones' hats are what we used to call 'creations'; extravagant, odd things for extravagant, odd people like Madonna or Lady Gaga. They're worn in a parallel universe.
If we want our daughters to honor their bodies, they need to hear us honor ours, no matter what size or shape we are, no matter what scars or sags we see in that mirror.
When I was 41, I found a lump the size of a grape in my right breast. I ended up bald, sick and exhausted from surgeries, chemo and radiation treatments. Ah, but I got to live.
I don't know what's going on in America. I know what people in New York and Beverly Hills think about Whole Foods, but I don't know what people anywhere else think.
I don't have many people showing up at my door. Very few people come out. When they do, I get a little suspicious. I live way up on a hill, way, way back in the country.
President George W. Bush, in his now-rare public appearances and interviews, still refuses to acknowledge he did anything to help Iran. But it doesn't really matter what he thinks.
Anyone who follows the Middle East and Islamic world in general can't deny it is often a very violent place, that a band of instability now stretches from Algeria to Pakistan.
When you look at Syria, and you look at all the militant groups on the ground, there are many groups in Syria that could pose a threat to the United States, not just Khorasan.
