Adolescence is a tough time for parent and child alike. It is a time between: between childhood and maturity, between parental protection and personal responsibility, between life stage- managed by grown-ups and life privately held.

Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us.

My most pronounced writing habit is trying not to write.

If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books.

Like cellulite creams or hair-loss tonics, capital punishment is one of those panaceas that isn't. Only it costs a whole lot more.

I'm going to live long enough to live in an America that will assume universal health care is a basic right. That will be amusing and terrific.

By the time you kill and mount what you catch, it has lost that very thing that made it worth having. I knew this only as a vague sense of disappointment at age 10; not until later did I recognize it as a metaphor for much of life.