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I was affected by the harshness of government, the reality of 16-hour days, and the pressures of modern communications.

I was reading newspaper front pages from the 1930s, and I was taken aback. I'm not naive about American history, but I was a bit knocked off my feet by things that used to be on the front pages of newspapers.

As a child growing up in World War II, I was very moved and stirred by what was going on, but I distanced myself from history. I regarded history as just one more subject.

The civil rights movement was very important in my house, and then Vietnam was very important 'cause there were two boys, so I came of age during a very heated political climate.

I found out about the Spanish war because I was in Germany when it began.

And with each day that passed, the gulf broadened and my isolation became more accentuated. In such a situation, the discovery that my experience was not unique, that it had also been that of other Spanish intellectuals, became very important for me.

I think I was affected quite a bit by musical and creative influences that go all the way back to my childhood.

I did not throw out my education lightly, but what I was being taught was of no use in explaining what I saw around me. It was the Great Depression.

From 1989 to 2000, I was focusing in on my children. I hadn't realized the world had changed a lot. AIDS had happened, for starters, and so many people in the arts died or were affected.

The Iraq War was the biggest issue for people of my generation in the West. It was also the clearest case, in my living memory, of media manipulation and the creation of a war through ignorance.