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

In a democratic society, the only treason is silence.

You teach your 16-year-old with your heart in your mouth to be a good driver and none of that makes any difference when some drunk comes around a corner and runs a stop sign.

All of the qualities that you need to be a good opinion columnist tend to be qualities that aren't valued in women.

Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of a minute could have changed everything and everyone. Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.

I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are to write, and there are very few of them.

That is supposed to be the rallying cry of women in the age of AIDS: no condom, no sex. But the dirty little secret is that the rallying cry is a whisper.... The great unspoken on the heterosexual AIDS front has been how behavior is still determined by the old psychosexual minuet of the sexes, the lack of responsibility in young men and of assertiveness in young women.