I was doing the family grocery shopping accompanied by two children, an event I hope to see included in the Olympics in the near future.

The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.

Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life. And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.

... It was the idea of facing a future skimming the surface of life, winging my way in and out of other people's crises, confusions, and passages, engaging them enough to get the story, but never enough to be indelibly touched by what I had seen or heard.

Anyone who has breast-fed knows two things for sure: The baby wants to be fed at the most inopportune times, in the most inopportune places, and the baby will prevail.... And so the baby should, and the mom, too. Sometimes a breast is a sexual object, and sometimes it's a food delivery system, and one need not preclude nor color the other.

knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us.