I say, when your hair turns gray and your children think they know who you are, do the thing that shakes up who you think you are, even who you had prided yourself on being. When all those around you say they simply don't recognize you any longer, that's the real compliment.

I had spent years thinking about one thing while I was doing another. I had, in fact, prided myself on being able to do two things at once.

The desire to write a novel is the single required prerequisite for writing a novel.

The only siblings I have are half-siblings. My nuclear family would have been an extra-suffocating threesome. Instead, I have an interesting brother and sister, in-laws, and darling nephews.

Like most of the educated, I do harbor a fondness for the sins of my ignorant past.

Hungry ears are sharp ones.

One of the profound effects of economics in our day is that the people with the money and the power have embraced the guilt-free, external-less, everything-will-turn-out-okay-in-the-end philosophy of economics in order to justify their own evil works. And the economists, for the most part, have sucked up to that money.