And I don't have to listen to a sermon to know what to think or feel about them. It's almost as if I absorbed completely what mattered most to me, and the rest could go.

I'm always keeping an eye on the court. Also, when the members of Congress came to his office during the budget debacle of a year and a half back and said, "We want to de-fund Planned Parenthood," he said, "Not going to happen." Those apparently were more or less his exact words.

I don't do research for my novels. Obviously, in my other line of work as a reporter and a columnist, I've had the opportunity to get to know both social workers and TV talk-show hosts.

Women writers of all people should know better than to pigeonhole women, put them in little groups, the smart one, the sweet one.

If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books.

My home was in a pleasant place outside of Philadelphia. But I really lived, truly lived, somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books.

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