Unless we include a job as part of every citizen's right to autonomy and personal fulfillment, women will continue to be vulnerable to someone else's idea of what need is.

We all know as we travel around this country or around the world that there are huge problems, and also people doing amazing things on the ground - but those people rarely get reported. Our media are so into conflict that they sometimes say to me, "Bring an 'anti' with you."

I continued for too long to do things that I already knew how to do, or to write stories that I was assigned instead of fighting for stories that I couldn't get, or doing ones that I thought were important on my own. The wasting of time is the thing I worry about the most. Because time is all there is.

Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.

I have always employed humor, and I think it’s absolutely crucial that we do because, among other things, humor is the only free emotion. I mean, you can compel fear, as we know. You can compel love, actually, if somebody is isolated and dependent — it’s like the Stockholm syndrome. But you can’t compel laughter. It happens when two things come together and make a third unexpectedly. It happens when you learn something, too.

As a profession, freelance writing is notoriously insecure. That's the first argument in its favor. For many reasons, a few of them rational, the thought of knowing exactly what next year's accomplishments, routine, income, and vacation will be - or even what time I have to get up tomorrow morning - has always depressed me.

Paradoxically, only journeying backward in time and reentering the home we once knew allows us to go forward to the home we've always wanted.