Ignorant free speech often works against the speaker. That is one of several reasons why it must be given rein instead of suppressed.

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

Amid attempts to protect elephants from ivory poachers and dolphins from tuna nets, the rights of children go remarkably unremarked.

I've been a feminist since I was a teenager, but originally it was because I wanted to make the world a better place for me.

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.

For most of my life the only ceremonies I've been to at which women were the stars were weddings. So I like weddings.

[I]n contrast to the common belief that they are the world's greatest cynics, the best journalists are the world's great idealists. They have experienced firsthand the great soothing balance of human existence. For every disgrace there is triumph, for every wrong there is a moment of justice, for every funeral a wedding, for every obituary a birth announcement.