To have the kind of year you want to have something has to happen that you can't explain why it happened. Something has to happen that you can't coach.

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.

I saw what happened when a dictator was allowed to take over a piece of a country and the country went down the tubes. And I saw the opposite during the war when America joined the fight.

We have been terrorised by what happened in America and we express our condolences to the American people who suffered from this unexpected catastrophe and a new world war.