Life is so messy that the temptation to straighten it up is very strong. And the results always illusory.

The issue is privacy. Why is the decision by a woman to sleep with a man she has just met in a bar a private one, and the decision to sleep with the same man for $100 subject to criminal penalties?

All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.

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.

I love having a president who I think is smarter than I am.

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.

The Statue of Liberty is meant to be shorthand for a country so unlike its parts that a trip from California to Indiana should require a passport.