The truth is that when you're writing a novel you're really living in it; you're living in the house, and you're living in the town.

The unemployment rate among the young in the United States is still very disconcerting, although we all know it's nowhere near as bad as it is in some of the European countries, where in some places it approaches 50 percent.

All the things we don’t say, all the words we swallow, and it makes nothing but trouble.

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.

Maybe I had three children in the first place so I wouldn't ever have to play board games. In my religion, martyrs die.

Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.

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