There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.

Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.

Laughter may instruct but it may also conceal, defending the joker against anger and retaliation: a game is only a game.

That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before.

Remember,' she'd tell her staff, 'every customer wants to feel like a princess, and princesses are selfish and overbearing.

The fabric of democracy is always fragile everywhere because it depends on the will of citizens to protect it, and when they become scared, when it becomes dangerous for them to defend it, it can go very quickly.

Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win.