The rhetoric is the first step, it coarsens attitudes.

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

History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get ….

Perhaps this was the secret to being at peace: want nothing but what is given to you..

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

Fiction just has a lot more room for ambivalence and internal conflict, contradiction, and for me that sums up so much of what people felt after 9/11….

Nothing in life gets dropped without someone else having to pick it up..

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

Fabricating reality was criminal; editing it, commonplace..

My children, who are almost two: watching them develop has made me pay much closer attention to how we become who we are..

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..

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….

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