Here is the real domino theory - gay man to gay man, bisexual man to straight woman, addict mother to newborn baby, they all fall down and someday it will come to you.

If you raise an intelligent girl she will become a feminist because of the facts of her own life. Raising feminist boys is more difficult. Raising egalitarian boys. One of the reasons you have to raise them that way is because it's better for them.

When I write a novel, I have what I think of as an icon that helps get me into the world of the book.

We are awash in the revealed world.

More than a decade after our fellow citizens began bedding down on the sidewalks, their problems continue to seem so intractable that we have begun to do psychologically what government has been incapable of doing programmatically. We bring the numbers down--not by solving the problem, but by deciding it's their own damn fault.

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

Jane Austen may not be the best writer, but she certainly writes about the best people. And by that I mean people just like me.