Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't trust your kids to t….

Whether talking about addiction, taxation [on cigarettes] or education [about smoking], there is always at the center of the conversation an essentia….

I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left me was that it was possible to love and care for a man a….

I wondered why I hadn't loved that day more, why I hadn't savored every bit of it...why I hadn't known how good it was to live so normally, so everyd….

Women are the glue that holds our day-to-day world together..

And yet we constantly reclaim some part of that primal spontaneity through the youngest among us, not only through their sorrow and anger but simply ….

Novels are usually built on conflict, sometimes very, very difficult conflict. It's why men write war novels - because there you go, there's the conf….

I do think that people who are now in their sixties and their seventies are living a different kind of life than their grandparents led, even in thes….

I can't begin to predict how news will be delivered to readers in, say, 100 years. But I do know one thing that hasn't changed: Whatever the delivery….

Being accused of making money by selling sex in Hollywood, home of the casting couch and the gratuitous nude scene, is so rich with irony that it's a….

While liberals had embraced Obama as someone who had left-wing progressive ideas, the truth is that by personality he's a very incremental guy..

I'm boggled by the idea of being an only child. I know nothing at all (I'm happy to say) about having had a cold and withholding mother, about being ….

Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around, and nearly every book represents what my son's third grade teacher refers to as a "teachable mo….

I'm always keeping an eye on the court. Also, when the members of Congress came to his office during the budget debacle of a year and a half back and….

If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books..

I can't think of a single downside to motherhood now..

I am an affirmative action hire..

It's an odd kind of feeling because it sort of reminds me of being five again. When you're a five-year-old, you don't pay any attention to what anyon….

It is so easy to exist instead of live..

There are those of us who believe that under certain conditions the cruelest thing you can do to people you love is to force them to live. There are ….

Reading is another thing that has made me more human by exposing me to worlds I might never have entered and people I might never meet..