If an opportunity scares you, that's God's way of saying you should jump at it..

Now the baby boomers, i.e., us, are getting older, and were suddenly discovering that there are great things about getting older. You have time for y….

I would even go to Washington, which is saying something for me, just to glimpse Jane Q. Public, being sworn in as the first female president of the ….

You realize that these accidental decisions you make about changing jobs, about moving into an apartment where you make new friends and confidants, a….

When I quit The New York Times to be a fulltime mother, the voices of the world said I was nuts....But if success is not on your own terms, if it loo….

The one thing that I always got positive reinforcement for from teachers, who really changed my life, was the written word..

an the president bring out the voters who were so enthusiastic about him in 2008 and seem a little disenchanted now? Can he bring out young people? C….

If I had to guess what the new Etch-A-Sketch picture is going to be like, it's going to be considerably less to the right. Romney has backed himself ….

It's only before realities set in that we can treasure our delusions..

It is this that, finally, I will try to teach my sons about sex, after I've explained fertile periods and birth control and all the other mechanics t….

I've always had a certain facility with words..

The Statue of Liberty is meant to be shorthand for a country so unlike its parts that a trip from California to Indiana should require a passport..

Look around at the azaleas making fuchsia star bursts in spring; look at a full moon hanging silver in a black sky on a cold night. And realize that ….

I think what saved me, as a writer, is that there are really two breaking points in my life. One was when I was 19 and my mother died, and one was wh….

The truth is that when you're writing a novel you're really living in it; you're living in the house, and you're living in the town..

The difference between government and leadership is that leadership has a soul..

But while ignorance can make you insensitive, familiarity can also numb. Entering the second half-century of an information age, our cumulative knowl….

I stopped going to mass, and boy, it was painful for me, and it was certainly painful for my family, but I just couldn't ratify their behavior and th….

A friend and I flew south with our children. During the week we spent together I took off my shoes, let down my hair, took apart my psyche, cleaned t….

There's a certain kind of conversation you have from time to time at parties in New York about a new book. The word "banal" sometimes rears its by-no….

Here is the real domino theory - gay man to gay man, bisexual man to straight woman, addict mother to newborn baby, they all fall down and someday it….