It is not that fathers are better or worse, not that they are more loved or criticized, but rather that they are viewed with far less intensity. There is no Philip Roth or Woody Allen or Nancy Friday who writes about fathers with a runaway excess of humor, horror ... feeling. Most of us let our fathers off the hook.

Maybe this year, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives not looking for flaws, but looking for potential.

I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.

The great myth of our work-intense era is 'quality time.' We believe we can make up for the loss of days or hours, especially with each other, by concentrated minutes. But ultimately there is no way to do one-minute mothering. There is no way to pay attention in a hurry.

You can teach someone who cares to write columns, but you can’t teach someone who writes columns to care.

Maybe at 20 you can write well, but I don't think you could do what I do. Some things have to happen to you first.

She goes in with a prejudice and comes out with a statistic.