Being accused of making money by selling sex in Hollywood, home of the casting couch and the gratuitous nude scene, is so rich with irony that it's a better subject for a comic novel than a column.... On one coast the cops are busting sex workers on Eighth Avenue, dragging them downtown to night court where they pay the fine and go right back to their corner; on another they're charging Heidi Fleiss with pandering in a town in which the verb is an art form.

All things being equal, I would choose a woman over a man in order to even the balance of power, to insinuate a different perspective into the process, to give young women something to shoot for and someone to look up to. But all things are rarely equal.

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

You realize that these accidental decisions you make about changing jobs, about moving into an apartment where you make new friends and confidants, about going to one city over another, that sometimes they're completely arbitrary decisions that you haven't put as much thought into as perhaps you should have, and yet they change the course of your whole life.

I do tend to be almost kind of Pollyanna-ish person.

part of the problem with a war on poverty today is that many Americans have decided that being poor is a character defect, not an economic condition.

Get a life. A real life. Not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house.