The decimation of Lebanon was showing up in Chicago as a series of restaurants and little shops, just as the destruction of Vietnam had been visible here a decade earlier. If you never read the news but ate out a lot you should be able to tell who was getting beaten up around the world.

If I were elected President, the first thing I would do would be to set up a Department of Restoring the Bill of Rights. I would have 10,000 people working there.

Sisters in Crime now has more than 4,000 members worldwide.

I'm at the atheist end of the agnostic spectrum.

My parents were liberal intellectuals but even they expected me to stay at home and look after my younger siblings and do the housework.

Nothing kinder than strangers. Nothing stranger than kindness.

Heart surgeons do not have the world's smallest egos: when you ask them to name the world's three leading practitioners, they never can remember the names of the other two.