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

Ignorant free speech often works against the speaker. That is one of several reasons why it must be given rein instead of suppressed.

The one thing that I always got positive reinforcement for from teachers, who really changed my life, was the written word.

The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. That's how life is most of the time, isn't it? You know where you are and where you hope to wind up. It's the getting there that's challenging.

A week in the hospital she had told us. A hysterectomy, she had said. It had seemed unremarkable to me in a woman of forty-six long finished with childbearing, although every day that I grow older I realize there is never anything unremarkable about losing any part of what makes you female - a breast, a womb, a child, a man.

high fashion has little to do with what women wear and a lot to do with what retailers mark down later.

I'm just remembering myself at 22 or 23. I was all engine and no steering. (Laughter) I had the wheels but I had no steering. I do think it's true that when you're younger, you're more likely to listen to all the naysayers, and people are always telling you how you ought to behave and what kind of job you should get and how you should look.