Reading is another thing that has made me more human by exposing me to worlds I might never have entered and people I might never meet.

The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.

And a great misunderstanding is that children think their parents are grown-up, and parents feel obliged to act as if they were.

The one thing that I always got positive reinforcement for from teachers, who really changed my life, was the written word.

I think at every moment in the last probably 100 years, when the institutional church had the opportunity to do the right thing, they did the wrong thing. They're a dying institution in many parts of the world because they refuse to ordain women or married people. And now they're a dying institution because some of their members did enormous harm to young people and instead of responding aggressively with humility, and with love, and with the confession of wrongdoing, they tried to spin it as though they were a political party, and that's just deplorable.

I think anyone who comes upon a Nautilus machine suddenly will agree with me that its prototype was clearly invented at some time in history when torture was considered a reasonable alternative to diplomacy.

I can't think of anything to write about except families. They are a metaphor for every other part of society.