I conveniently forgot to remember that people only have two hands, or, as another parent once said of having a third child, it's time for a zone defense instead of man-to-man.

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?

You're like a cake when you're young. You can't rush it or it will fall, or just turn out wrong. Rising takes patience, and heat.

For most of my adult life, I have been an emotional hit-and- run driver--that is, a reporter. I made people like me, trust me, open their hearts and their minds to me, and cry and bleed on to the pages of my neat little notebooks, and then I went back to a safe place and made a story out of it.

[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.

So much of what you take for granted is the bedrock of happiness.

Guilt is what separates humans from animals.