“Look to society, and look to the crapshoot of the way any given set of parents’ genes line up. How was Raskolnikov created? How about the “patriots” who assaulted the Capitol Building? We live in our own private realities, and sometimes—too often—those private realities have nothing to do with the larger world around us. I speak from the point of view of a novelist, a profession to which only the delusional are called.”