[Erotica] contains the idea of love, positive choice, and the yearning for a particular person.

I'm not sure that it's up to me to sum up what I've done with it in the past. I'm not sure there's a way of knowing what we have done that is useful or important.

People waste more time waiting for someone to take charge of their lives than they do in any other pursuit.

You're a unique person. You should do what you're suited to do. We all should. It's the only way to be happy. That pressure is all outside. It's external.

Even when educators survey grade school texts and create new bibliographies to help teachers include Asians, Eskimos, and other Americans, females in and out of those groups may be down-played or forgotten.

I am terminally sentimental about graduations. They are more individual than weddings, more conscious than christenings, or bar mitzvahs or bat mitzvahs. They are almost as much a step into the unknown as funerals-though I assure you, there is life after graduation.

I think laughter is crucial. Some of the original cultures, like the Dalit and the Native American, don't separate laughter and seriousness.