It makes me angry to think that . . . female sanitation workers will spend their days doing a job most of their co-workers think they can't handle, and then they will go home and do another job most of their co-workers don't want.

Ignorant free speech often works against the speaker. That is one of several reasons why it must be given rein instead of suppressed.

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.

Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live." Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort...reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung.

Downtime is where we become ourselves, looking into the middle distance, kicking at the curb, lying on the grass or sitting on the stoop and staring at the tedious blue of the summer sky. I don't believe you can write poetry, or compose music, or become an actor without downtime, and plenty of it, a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity.

I remember adolescence, the years of having the impulse control of a mousetrap, of being as private as a safe-deposit box.

We're tortured, a lot of us, believe me.