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

I once wanted to be a personage. Now I am comfortable being a person.

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.

Reading is another thing that has made me more human by exposing me to worlds I might never have entered and people I might never meet.

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

The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.

The life of a good dog is like the life of a good person, only shorter and more compressed.