You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.

It's come at last", she thought, "the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache.

Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale.

Desperation, weakness, vulnerability - these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy.

In my situation, every time I write a sentence, I'm thinking not only of the people I ended up in college with but my siblings, my family, my school friends, the people from my neighborhood. I've come to realize that this is an advantage, really: it keeps you on your toes.

It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.