The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering is] quietly to each other, over cups of tea at a table sticky with spilled apple juice and littered with markers without tops.

I go online all the time, I just don't read about myself. I read a fashion website called Go Fug Yourself. I actually correspond with the Fug Girls and that's great.

America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by conflict between autonomy and security.

However, there will be a Republican Party platform that will coalesce around their convention. Unless I miss my guess, it will be considerably more conservative on these issues, perhaps even than Governor Romney is, and I think that that will give Americans a clear set of choices about all issues, but about women's issues too.

I've always had a certain facility with words.

That's really what I want in a leader; I want somebody who's really, really smart.

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.