Suicide is a crime of loneliness, and adulated people can be frighteningly alone. Intelligence does not help in these circumstances; brilliance is almost always profoundly isolating.

The campaign against polygamy, around which a lot of anti-Mormon sentiment was organized, seems horrific to me.

Penalizing homosexuals does not save any innocent victims. The idea that God and the Church accept these people while they are celibate; and then if they go off and do something with someone else and both derive joy from it without any apparent harm to anyone else, the Church excommunicates them - that, to me, is bizarre.

I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good.

A sense of humor is the best indicator that you will recover; it is often the best indicator that people will love you. Sustain that and you have hope.

I have spent a lot of my life trying to do good and be a humanitarian, to write about difficult places, and to tell the story of oppressed peoples.

I've chronicled the experience of the mother of a transgender child who got attacked by the Ku Klux Klan in Tennessee, and that of a transgender woman who was asked to deliver a sermon at her Montana church and got a standing ovation from her congregation. The idea that Christianity is a blanket term that encompasses both of those attitudes seems ludicrous to me.