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

No agent wants to see a book until he or she has decided whether to pursue the relationship

Live disasters are wonderful attractions when you're safe on the other side of them.

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.

When I tell people I was in the St. Justin Martyr parish, if they are native Chicagoans they know exactly where I was and what that was like. The Sunday before this particular march, the archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Cody, had required all of his pastors to read a letter in support of open housing and economic justice in every parish in the city.

All food starting with p is comfort food: pasta, potato chips, pretzels, peanut butter, pastrami, Pizza, pastry.

The hardest thing about adolescence is that everything seems too big. There's no way to get context or perspective, ..... Pain and joy without limits. No one can live like that forever, so experience finally comes to our rescue. We come to know what we can endure, and also that nothing endures.