I really feel like I'm a liberal because I'm a Catholic, because I took the words of the New Testament to heart.

part of the problem with a war on poverty today is that many Americans have decided that being poor is a character defect, not an economic condition.

Each instance of sexual harassment has to be judged on its merits. Facts, timing, motives, credibility: all must be considered before we make up our own minds what to believe.

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

I think I'm like most novelists in that my books have gotten farther and farther away from autobiography the longer I've been writing them.

Downtime is where we become ourselves, looking into the middle distance, kicking at the curb, lying on the grass or sitting on the stoop and staring at the tedious blue of the summer sky. I don't believe you can write poetry, or compose music, or become an actor without downtime, and plenty of it, a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity.

It often seems, looking back, that the unexpected comes to define us, the paths we didn't see coming and may have wandered down by mistake. The older we get the more willing we are to follow those, to surprise ourselves.