There were in life rarely, if ever, "right" decisions, never perfect ones, only the best to be made under the circumstances..

[s]he was a compulsive pessimist, always looking for the soft brown spot in the fruit, pressing so hard she created it..

My parents are aging and there are difficult issues. It's strange to have children at the beginning of life and parents nearing the end..

Fabricating reality was criminal; editing it, commonplace..

In life, redemption was walking up the down escalator: stop to congratulate yourself, and back you slid..

Marrying Cal, the scion of a family whose wealth dated to the Industrial Revolution and had multiplied through every turn of the American economy sin….

Over the centuries, and even today, the Bible and Christian theology have helped justify the Crusades, slavery, violence against gays, and the murder….

The rhetoric is the first step, it coarsens attitudes.

Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from not….

While researching 'The Submission,' I went to a protest against the Ground Zero mosque in New York when I was about to give birth to twins. It was ab….

As a novelist, you deepen your characters as you go, adding layers. As a reporter, you try to peel layers away: observing subjects enough to get bene….

The September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon prompted a fundamental shift in the American government's approach to Isla….

I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I ass….

I'm kind of a mash-up of taste - Graham Greene and Jane Austen; W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro..

I read Claire Messud's 'The Emperor's Children,' I read Joseph O'Neill's 'Netherland' - but to me, they're not 9/11 novels. In 'The Emperor's Childre….

Jealousy clings to love's underside like bats to a bridge..

As a reporter you tend to seek coherence from your subject or your source - it all needs to add up and make sense. In truth, in reality, there's ofte….

Eden, paradise - all the best gardens are imaginary..

And as journalists we look for differences - differences between countries, cultures, classes, and communities. We're very sensitized to difference, ….

So the premise of 'The Submission' is that there's an anonymous competition to design a 9/11 memorial and it's won by an American Muslim, an architec….

In architecture, space was a material to be shaped, even created. For these men, the material was silence. Silence like water in which you could drow….