You realize that these accidental decisions you make about changing jobs, about moving into an apartment where you make new friends and confidants, about going to one city over another, that sometimes they're completely arbitrary decisions that you haven't put as much thought into as perhaps you should have, and yet they change the course of your whole life.

There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.

I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.

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.

The Cairo conferenceis about a complicated web of education and employment, consumption and poverty, development and health care. It is also about whether governments will follow where women have so clearly led them, toward safe, simple and reliable choices in family planning. While Cairo crackles with conflict, in the homes of the world the orthodoxies have been duly heard, and roundly ignored.

When I quit The New York Times to be a fulltime mother, the voices of the world said I was nuts....But if success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your soul, it is not success at all.

I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and one of the things I like to say is that one of the biggest impediments I had to becoming a successful writer is I had a very happy childhood.