More than a decade after our fellow citizens began bedding down on the sidewalks, their problems continue to seem so intractable that we have begun to do psychologically what government has been incapable of doing programmatically. We bring the numbers down--not by solving the problem, but by deciding it's their own damn fault.

I don't really read what people write about me. Someone gives my novel one star; are they a troll? Are they someone who hates my politics and so has decided to do that?

When I quit The New York Times to be a fulltime mother, the voices of the world said I was nuts....But if success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your soul, it is not success at all.

At the same time that you've got to open yourself up to the fact that experience is going to teach you year after year, decade after decade. I remember I very badly wanted to write a newspaper column when I was only 21 years old, and I went to my editor and told him that, and he said, "You're a really good writer, but you haven't lived long enough to be qualified to live out loud."

I can't think of anything to write about except families. They are a metaphor for every other part of society.

Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.

Don't ever forget the words on a postcard that my father sent me last year: "If you win the rat race, you're still a rat.