[President Johnson] had the political will to say that having one in five Americans living in the kind of abject conditions their fellow citizens associated with Third World countries and the novels of Dickens was as dangerous as any battlefield enemy.

This is why I had children: to offer them a perfect dream of childhood that can fill their souls as they grow older.

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.

Wow, so much of the way I've transacted my life... so much of the results that I'm happy about are because of what Daddy did.

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.

There are a million moving parts to raising kids, and you can't always anticipate them all, especially when they are teenagers and their peers play such a huge role in their lives. If you offer independence, there is one kind of pitfall; if you shelter them too much, there is another. And sometimes you do everything right and something bad just happens. It's as simple, and as scary, as that.

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.