I got my first big paycheck for 'My Best Friend's Wedding.' This was in the days when you actually did get paid to have a supporting role. It just doesn't happen like that anymore but this was in the '90s. It was the golden age!

It happened in Miami in Coral Gables a great big ol' Cuban wedding. It was pretty intense.

That sense of what happened in Europe in World War II has shaped a lot of my views.

What happened in America in the 1860s was a war of secession a war of independence no different in principle from what happened in America in the 1770s and 1780s.

After every major conflict - World War I World War II Korea Vietnam the fall of the Soviet Union - what happened was that we ultimately hollowed out the force largely by doing deep across-the-board cuts.

My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories - not so many but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then to my father's generation. It's a kind of inheritance the memory of it.

In the months leading up to World War II there was a tendency among many Americans to talk absently about the trouble in Europe. Nothing that happened an ocean away seemed very threatening.

I was going to be a great woman novelist. Then the war came along and I think it's hard for young people today don't you to realize that when World War II happened we were dying to go and help our country.

Bad things do happen in the world like war natural disasters disease. But out of those situations always arise stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

War is what happens when language fails.