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.

You want to have fun with your kids, and no one has fun with someone who runs roughshod.

New York is a city where it's particularly hard to be poor, not only because everything costs twice as much as it does elsewhere but because over-the-top affluence is part of its identity.

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

My most pronounced writing habit is trying not to write.

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

Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of a minute could have changed everything and everyone. Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.