Gossip. The more you talk about why people do things, the more ideas you have about how the world works.

Combined families often get bad reviews, but the family my children got when they traded away 'the suffocating four-person' nuclear one is one that has benefited all of them.

A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.

Most of my childhood revolved around wondering when we would be blown up by the Russians. I couldn't stand the news, I knew that if the missile were launched, mortality would arrive in half an hour, so I spent a lot of my childhood feeling that I was 30 minutes from being dead.

The one thing ... maybe no family could tolerate was things coming out into the open.

As soon as you bring up money, I notice, conversation gets sociological, then political, then moral.

a bookstore is one of the few places where all the cantankerous, conflicting, alluring voices of the world co-exist in peace and order and the avid reader is as free as a person can possibly be, because she is free to choose among them.