Socialized medicine, some still cry, but it's long been socialized, with those covered paying for those who are underinsured. American medicine is simply socialized badly, penny wise and pound foolish.

That's what makes life so hard for women, that instead of thinking that this is the way things are, we always think it's the way we are.

I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are to write, and there are very few of them.

There may perhaps be a new generation of doctors horrified by lacerations, infections, women who have douched with kitchen cleanser. What an irony it would be if fanatics continued to kill and yet it was the apathy and silence of the medical profession that most wounded the ability to provide what is, after all, a medical procedure.

You just can't tell or calibrate motive or intelligence or sense. So I don't read anything unless someone tells me that it's really smart or illuminating. I don't read any reviews anymore and it's been really liberating.

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.

In the same way the Brits had to get used to the idea that the sun had set on the British Empire, I think that there's the subrosa feeling that we are at the end of the American century, and I think that's very, very hard for Americans to take.