I'm sure not afraid of success and I've learned not to be afraid of failure. The only thing I'm afraid of now is of being someone I don't like much.

Children should have enough freedom to be themselves - once they've learned the rules.

the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.

A writer is always working with whatever she's managed to store in the brainpan or puzzle out about the world.

That is supposed to be the rallying cry of women in the age of AIDS: no condom, no sex. But the dirty little secret is that the rallying cry is a whisper.... The great unspoken on the heterosexual AIDS front has been how behavior is still determined by the old psychosexual minuet of the sexes, the lack of responsibility in young men and of assertiveness in young women.

Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description.

Ethnic stereotypes are misshapen pearls, sometimes with a sandy grain of truth at their center. ... but they ignore complexity, change, and individuality.