They say the Lord's Day is a day of rest, but those who preach this generally are not women..

The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting….

Writing is like bricklaying; you put down one word after another. Sometimes the wall goes up straight and true and sometimes it doesn't and you have ….

A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand..

You go on. You set one foot in front of the other, and if a thin voice cries out, somewhere behind you, you pretend not to hear, and keep going..

We were too intelligent, too cynical for war. Of course, you don't have to be stupid and primitive to die a stupid, primitive death..

She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them..

Moral certainty can deafen people to any truth other than their own..

We are not the only animal that mourns; apes do, and elephants, and dogs. Yet we are the only one that tortures..

September 11, 2001, revealed heroism in ordinary people who might have gone through their lives never called upon to demonstrate the extent of their ….

If a man is to lose his fortune, it is a good thing if he were poor before he acquired it, for poverty requires aptitude..

And at this moment in history, our core value happens to be the raw, aching truth of the human predicament. It may also be the only belief that can s….

Instead of idleness, vanity, or an intellect formed by the spoon-feeding of others, my girls have acquired energy, industry, and independence..

There are always a few who stand up in times of communal madness and have the courage to say that what unites us is greater than what divides us..

I do believe that our modern English usage has become way too clipped and austere. I have been reading excerpts from the journals of 18th-century sea….

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws for….

Certainly I'm still mining my experiences as a journalist. I think it's no coincidence that all three of my novels basically are about how people act….

...The hagaddah came to Sarajevo for a reason. It was here to test us, to see if there were people who could see that what united us was more than wh….

Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink..

It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another's shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy..

To know a man's library is, in some measure, to know a man's mind..