People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it.

The problem... is emblematic of what hasn't changed during the equal opportunity revolution of the last 20 years. Doors opened; opportunities evolved. Law, institutions, corporations moved forward. But many minds did not.

It is so easy to waste our lives: Our days, our hours, our minutes ... it is so easy to exist instead of live.

There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.

I hadn't written a love story before and I hadn't written a novel with a happy ending before.

I hope readers will do what I do when I read a novel I like: talk in ways that will illuminate their own lives.

The Cairo conferenceis about a complicated web of education and employment, consumption and poverty, development and health care. It is also about whether governments will follow where women have so clearly led them, toward safe, simple and reliable choices in family planning. While Cairo crackles with conflict, in the homes of the world the orthodoxies have been duly heard, and roundly ignored.