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

Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement. It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won’t happen. We have to teach ourselves how to make room for them, to love them, and to live, really live.

There are obvious places in which government can narrow the chasm between haves and have-nots. One is the public schools, which have been seen as the great leveler, the authentic melting pot. That, today, is nonsense. In his scathing study of the nation's public school system entitled "Savage Inequalities," Jonathan Kozol made manifest the truth: that we have a system that discriminates against the poor in everything from class size to curriculum.

If we really feel like we're comfortable in our own skins now, we have a longer period of time to live out that kind of third or fourth act of our life.

I think one of the hardest things about doing a book in the first person is that to a certain extent each day, when you begin to do your work, you're climbing into somebody else's skin.

Sometimes change came all at once, with a sound like a fire taking hold of dry wood and paper, with a roar that rose around you so you couldn't hear yourself think. And then, when the roar died down, even when the fires were damped, everything was different.

part of the problem with a war on poverty today is that many Americans have decided that being poor is a character defect, not an economic condition.