Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. You toodle along, thinking that all gay men wear leather after dark and should never, ever be permitted around a Little League field. And then one day your best friend from college, the one your kids adore, comes out to you.

When I'm falling, my girlfriends are my soft landing.

Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.

Reading has always been life unwrapped to me, a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and the everyday. If being a parent consists often of passing along chunks of ourselves to unwitting-often unwilling-recipients, then books are, for me, one of the simplest and most sure-fire ways of doing that.

My father expected his first child to be a boy, and when it didn't turn out that way he didn't let the fact get in the way of a good story.

Obama doesn't seem like a burger and a beer kind of guy. I have to say, I don't find that problematic at all.

If we really feel like we're comfortable in our own skins now, we have a longer period of time to live out that kind of third or fourth act of our life.