When an actress takes off her clothes onscreen but a nursing mother is told to leave, what message do we send about the roles of women?

The issue is privacy. Why is the decision by a woman to sleep with a man she has just met in a bar a private one, and the decision to sleep with the same man for $100 subject to criminal penalties?

Uncontrollable consumerism has become a watchword of our culture despite regular and compelling calls for its end. The United States has more malls than high schools; Americans spend more time shopping than reading. ... Some of the most insightful writing about the American character over the nation's history has been about neither freedom nor democracy but about the crazed impulse to acquire things.

Decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

Well, I'd like to think I am, and I'd also like to think that we're all having a lot more fun getting older than we pretend. It was interesting to me when I first started working on this book that I'd mentioned that I was writing a memoir about aging and everybody would moan and groan and carry on.

Over the last twenty years, we've changed the world just enough to make it radically different, but not enough to make it work.

Barack Obama presents as kind of a cool character, and I think that that's his natural personality.