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Writing For Urbanmoms Has Awarded Me A Multitude Of Amazing Opportunities. I Have Traveled To New Places; Alone And With My Family. I Have Discovered New Products, New Books, New Trends And New Restaurants, And Been Able To Share Them With My Readers. I've Met Other Wonderful Writers And Many Incredible Celebrities.

-Anna Quindlen

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Writing For Urbanmoms Has

Anna Quindlen

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Writing For Urbanmoms Has Awarded Me A Multitude Of Amazing Opportunities. I Have Traveled To New Places; Alone And With My Family. I Have Discovered New Products, New Books, New Trends And New Restaurants, And Been Able To Share Them With My Readers. I've Met Other Wonderful Writers And Many Incredible Celebrities.

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More From Anna Quindlen

There Are A Million Moving Parts To Raising Kids, And You Can't Always Anticipate Them All, Especially When They Are Teenagers And Their Peers Play Such A Huge Role In Their Lives. If You Offer Independence, There Is One Kind Of Pitfall; If You Shelter Them Too Much, There Is Another. And Sometimes You Do Everything Right And Something Bad Just Happens. It's As Simple, And As Scary, As That.

We Read In Bed Because Reading Is Halfway Between Life And Dreaming, Our Own Consciousness In Someone Else's Mind.

Obama Doesn't Seem Like A Burger And A Beer Kind Of Guy. I Have To Say, I Don't Find That Problematic At All.

The Life Of A Good Dog Is Like The Life Of A Good Person, Only Shorter And More Compressed.

Ignorant Free Speech Often Works Against The Speaker. That Is One Of Several Reasons Why It Must Be Given Rein Instead Of Suppressed.

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 Looks Good To The World But Does Not Feel Good In Your Soul, It Is Not Success At All.

Every Story Has Already Been Told. Once You've Read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound And The Fury, To Kill A Mockingbird And A Wrinkle In Time, You Understand That There Is Really No Reason To Ever Write Another Novel. Except That Each Writer Brings To The Table, If She Will Let Herself, Something That No One Else In The History Of Time Has Ever Had.

Inspirational Life

And Sometimes You Do Everything Right And Something Bad Just Happens. It's As Simple, And As Scary, As That.

The Absence On The Panel Of Anyone Who Could Become Pregnant Accidentally Or Discover Her Salary Was Five Thousand Dollars A Yearless Than That Of Her Male Counterpart Meant There Was A Hole In The Consciousness Of The Committee That Empathy, However Welcome, Could Not Entirely Fill.

The Age Of Technology Has Both Revived The Use Of Writing And Provided Ever More Reasons For Its Spiritual Solace. Emails Are Letters, After All, More Lasting Than Phone Calls, Even If Many Of Them R 2 Cursory 4 U.

Raising Children Is A Spur-of-the-moment, Seat-of-the-pants Sort Of Deal, As Any Parent Knows, Particularly After An Adult Child Says That His Most Searing Memory Consists Of An Offhand Comment In The Car On The Way To Second Grade That The Parent Cannot Even Dimly Recall.

You Want To Have Fun With Your Kids, And No One Has Fun With Someone Who Runs Roughshod.

Well, We Tell Our Kids Things Like 'don't Gossip' And Then An Hour Later They Hear Us On The Phone. Stuff Like That.

I Think There Are Some Stories That Need To Be Told By A Specific Person As Opposed To In The Third Person.

Maybe Someday It Will Seem Quaint That, During A Time Of Plague, Some Of The Parents Of The 1990s Wanted To Deny Their Children Protection So That They Could Safeguard Their Own Self- Image. Or Maybe We'll Just Seem Like A Bunch Of Lunatics.

Life Is So Messy That The Temptation To Straighten It Up Is Very Strong. And The Results Always Illusory.

Familiarity Breeds Content.

Let Me Say First That Reading Is My Favorite Pastime, Bar None. If I Couldn't Read, I Don't Know What I'd Do. But As A Writer, It's Both A Blessing And A Curse. You Absorb Technique As You Go Along.

America Is A Country That Seems Forever To Be Toddler Or Teenager, At Those Two Stages Of Human Development Characterized By Conflict Between Autonomy And Security.

So I Do Think Sometimes The Political Mechanism Is Completely Disconnected From The People. However, What I Will Say Is That History Tells Us That Whenever Things Start To Move Too Fast, Whenever Progress Makes People Feel A Little Breathless, One Of The Go-to Spots That Government, That The Ruling Powers That Society Goes To Is To Try To Repress Women.

I Do Not Like Football, Which I Think Of As A Game In Which Two Tractors Approach Each Other From Opposite Directions And Collide. Besides, I Have Contempt For A Game In Which Players Have To Wear So Much Equipment. Men Play Basketball In Their Underwear, Which Seems Just Right To Me.

The Voices Of Conformity Speak So Loudly. Don't Listen To Them. No One Does The Right Thing Out Of Fear. If You Ever Utter The Words, 'we've Always Done It That Way,' I Urge You To Wash Out Your Mouth With Soap.

It Makes Me Angry To Think That . . . Female Sanitation Workers Will Spend Their Days Doing A Job Most Of Their Co-workers Think They Can't Handle, And Then They Will Go Home And Do Another Job Most Of Their Co-workers Don't Want.

You Just Can't Tell Or Calibrate Motive Or Intelligence Or Sense. So I Don't Read Anything Unless Someone Tells Me That It's Really Smart Or Illuminating. I Don't Read Any Reviews Anymore And It's Been Really Liberating.

Ask Any Woman How She Makes It Through The Day, And She May Mention Her Calendar, Her To-do Lists, Her Babysitter. But If You Push Her On How She Really Makes It Through Her Day, She Will Mention Her Girlfriends.

When An Actress Takes Off Her Clothes Onscreen But A Nursing Mother Is Told To Leave, What Message Do We Send About The Roles Of Women?

Somewhere Between A Third And A Quarter Of All People Living In America Today Were Born Between 1946 And 1965 And If You Think You're Tired Of Hearing About Us, You Should Try Being One Of Us.

I Do Tend To Be Almost Kind Of Pollyanna-ish Person.

There's Some Muscle Group Around Your Shoulders That Seizes Up During The Perfection Dance And Doesn't Let Go Until You Are Asleep, Or Alone. Or Maybe It Never Really Lets Go At All.

I Don't Understand How People Learn To Live In The World If They Haven't Had Siblings. Everything I Learned About Negotiation, Territoriality, Coexistence, Dislike, Inbred Differences And Love Despite Knowledge I Learned From My Four Younger Siblings.

[i]n Contrast To The Common Belief That They Are The World's Greatest Cynics, The Best Journalists Are The World's Great Idealists. They Have Experienced Firsthand The Great Soothing Balance Of Human Existence. For Every Disgrace There Is Triumph, For Every Wrong There Is A Moment Of Justice, For Every Funeral A Wedding, For Every Obituary A Birth Announcement.

It Is So Easy To Waste Our Lives: Our Days, Our Hours, Our Minutes ... It Is So Easy To Exist Instead Of Live.

Uncontrollable Consumerism Has Become A Watchword Of Our Culture Despite Regular And Compelling Calls For Its End. The United States Has More Malls Than High Schools; Americans Spend More Time Shopping Than Reading. ... Some Of The Most Insightful Writing About The American Character Over The Nation's History Has Been About Neither Freedom Nor Democracy But About The Crazed Impulse To Acquire Things.

The Greatest Public Health Threat For Many American Women Is The Men They Live With.

You Realize That Especially When You're Writing A Book Like This, Looking Back On Your Life, That There's Just Such A Depth Of Understanding You Acquire Over Time With The Help Of The People Who Love You That That's When You Can Really Get Down To What You Really Think And Believe.

If Men Got Pregnant, There Would Be Safe, Reliable Methods Of Birth Control. They'd Be Cheap, Too.

All Reading Is Good Reading. And All Reading Of Jane Austen And Charles Dickens Is Sublime Reading.

I'm Going To Live Long Enough To Live In An America That Will Assume Universal Health Care Is A Basic Right. That Will Be Amusing And Terrific.

I Was Very Driven, Very Focused, Very Ambitious. I Mean, When I Look Back On Myself In My 20s, Part Of Me Just Cringes.

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 Everyday. But You Only Know That, I Suppose, After It's Not Normal And Every Day Any Longer.

As I Said, I Had This Fabulous College Education. At College I Met The Man To Whom I've Been Married For 34 Years And Who Is The Father Of Those Three Kids. I Seriously Considered Going To Another College, And My Life Would Have Been Completely Different In Every Way.

But While Ignorance Can Make You Insensitive, Familiarity Can Also Numb. Entering The Second Half-century Of An Information Age, Our Cumulative Knowledge Has Changed The Level Of What Appalls, What Stuns, What Shocks.

I've Always Had A Certain Facility With Words.

You Teach Your 16-year-old With Your Heart In Your Mouth To Be A Good Driver And None Of That Makes Any Difference When Some Drunk Comes Around A Corner And Runs A Stop Sign.

I Only Really Understand Myself, What I'm Really Thinking And Feelings, When I've Talked It Over With My Circle Of Female Friends. When Days Go By Without That Connection, I Feel Like A Radio Playing In An Empty Room.

I Think A Lot Of People, But Particularly A Lot Of Women, Get To This Stage When I'd Say They're Over 50. We Face A Lot Of Hard Judgment From The World, We Women. If You're A Full-time Mother, You Should Be Out Working. If You're Out Working, Your Kids Must Be Being Overlooked.

My Child Looked At Me And I Looked Back At Him In The Delivery Room, And I Realized That Out Of A Sea Of Infinite Possibilities It Had Come Down To This: A Specific Person, Born On The Hottest Day Of The Year, Conceived On A Christmas Eve, Made By His Father And Me Miraculously From Scratch.

London Opens To You Like A Novel Itself. [...] It Is Divided Into Chapters, The Chapters Into Scenes, The Scenes Into Sentences; It Opens To You Like A Series Of Rooms, Door, Passsage, Door. Mayfair To Piccadilly To Soho To The Strand.

And I Don't Have To Listen To A Sermon To Know What To Think Or Feel About Them. It's Almost As If I Absorbed Completely What Mattered Most To Me, And The Rest Could Go.

It Would Take A Helluva Man To Replace No Man At All.

I Do Think There's Some Aspect Of Being A Novelist That Is A Little Crazy Making.

That Is Supposed To Be The Rallying Cry Of Women In The Age Of Aids: No Condom, No Sex. But The Dirty Little Secret Is That The Rallying Cry Is A Whisper.... The Great Unspoken On The Heterosexual Aids Front Has Been How Behavior Is Still Determined By The Old Psychosexual Minuet Of The Sexes, The Lack Of Responsibility In Young Men And Of Assertiveness In Young Women.

I'm Just Remembering Myself At 22 Or 23. I Was All Engine And No Steering. (laughter) I Had The Wheels But I Had No Steering. I Do Think It's True That When You're Younger, You're More Likely To Listen To All The Naysayers, And People Are Always Telling You How You Ought To Behave And What Kind Of Job You Should Get And How You Should Look.

Having Children Can Smooth The Relationship, Too. Mother And Daughter Are Now Equals. That Is Hard To Imagine, Even Harder To Accept, For Among Other Things, It Means Realizing That Your Own Mother Felt This Way, Too--unsure Of Herself, Weak In The Knees, Terrified About What In The World To Do With You. It Means Accepting That She Was Tired, Inept, Sometimes Stupid; That She, Too, Sat In The Dark At 2:00 A.m. With A Child Shrieking Across The Hall And No Clue To The Child's Trouble.

I Think Books In Which People Are Really Happy And Things Are Going Well Are Probably The Most Challenging Novels There Are To Write, And There Are Very Few Of Them.

If I Get The Forty Additional Years Statisticians Say Are Likely Coming To Me, I Could Fit In At Least One, Maybe Two New Lifetimes. Sad That Only One Of Those Lifetimes Can Include Being The Mother Of Young Children.

Acts Of Bravery Don't Always Take Place On Battlefields. They Can Take Place In Your Heart, When You Have The Courage To Honor Your Character, Your Intellect, Your Inclinations, And Yes, Your Soul By Listening To Its Clean, Clear Voice Of Direction Instead Of Following The Muddied Messages Of A Timid World.

Well, I'd Like To Think I Am, And I'd Also Like To Think That We're All Having A Lot More Fun Getting Older Than We Pretend. It Was Interesting To Me When I First Started Working On This Book That I'd Mentioned That I Was Writing A Memoir About Aging And Everybody Would Moan And Groan And Carry On.

I Think Americans Suspect, Without Even Being Able To Articulate It, That We're At The End Of The American Century; That We're At The End Of The 100 Or 125 Or 150 Years When We Were The Undisputed Arbiter And Leader Of The World.

The Misdeeds Of Ordinary Men Can Be Buried With Them, And Their Lives Described In Half-truths That Are Really Half-lies. But Not A Public Man. Particularly Not This One.

The Life You Have Led Doesn't Need To Be The Only Life You Have.

It Is Hard To Find Someone Who Will Give Your Children A Feeling Of Security While It Lasts And Not Wound Them Too Much When It Isfinished, Who Will Treat Those Children As If They Were Her Own, But Knows--and Never Forgets--that They Are Yours.

Downtime Is Where We Become Ourselves, Looking Into The Middle Distance, Kicking At The Curb, Lying On The Grass Or Sitting On The Stoop And Staring At The Tedious Blue Of The Summer Sky. I Don't Believe You Can Write Poetry, Or Compose Music, Or Become An Actor Without Downtime, And Plenty Of It, A Hiatus That Passes For Boredom But Is Really The Quiet Moving Of The Wheels Inside That Fuel Creativity.

You Can Get Rid Of The Column. It's A Little Like Staying At A Hotel; You Get Used To The Shape Of The Room, And Then You're Gone. With A Novel You Move Into Town And Stay For A Long Time. That's Both Comforting And Terrifying.

I Do Get A Sense That There's A Huge Disconnect Between The Political Powers And What's Really Happening, So Right-wing Conservatives Can Talk About Contraception All They Want, But The Women Of America Are Using Birth Control. It's As Simple As 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 When I Was 31 And My First Child Was Born. And That Sort Of Gave Me A Kind Of Rebirth That I Think Has Been Invaluable To Me As A Novelist, In Terms Of Seeing The World Anew.

Get A Life In Which You Notice The Smell Of Salt Water Pushing Itself On A Breeze Over The Dunes, A Life In Which You Stop And Watch How A Red-tailed Hawk Circles Over A Pond And A Stand Of Pines. Get A Life In Which You Pay Attention To The Baby As She Scowls With Concentration When She Tried To Pick Up A Cheerio With Her Thumb And First Finger.

A Writer Is Always Working With Whatever She's Managed To Store In The Brainpan Or Puzzle Out About The World.

Sometimes I Remind Myself That I Almost Skipped The Party, That I Almost Went To A Different College, That The Whim Of A Minute Could Have Changed Everything And Everyone. Our Lives, So Settled, So Specific, Are Built On Happenstance.

Being A Parent Is Not Transaction ... We Do Not Get What We Give. It Is The Ultimate Pay-it-forward Endeavor: We Are Good Parents Not So They Will Be Loving Enough To Stay With Us But So They Will Be Strong Enough To Leave Us.

The Difference Between Government And Leadership Is That Leadership Has A Soul.

It Is Difficult For Me To Imagine The Same Dedication To Women's Rights On The Part Of The Kind Of Man Who Lives In Partnership With Someone He Likes And Respects, And The Kind Of Man Who Considers Breast-augmentation Surgery Self-improvement.

We Don't Do Ambivalence Well In America. We Do Courage Of Our Convictions. We Do Might Makes Right. Ambivalence Is French. Certainty Is American.

I Don't Do Research For My Novels. Obviously, In My Other Line Of Work As A Reporter And A Columnist, I've Had The Opportunity To Get To Know Both Social Workers And Tv Talk-show Hosts.

Reading Is Not Simply An Intellectual Pursuit But An Emotional And Spiritual One. It Lights The Candle In The Hurricane Lamp Of Self; That's Why It Survives

Knowledge Of Our Own Mortality Is The Greatest Gift God Ever Gives Us.

I Go Online All The Time, I Just Don't Read About Myself. I Read A Fashion Website Called Go Fug Yourself. I Actually Correspond With The Fug Girls And That's Great.

Don't Ever Confuse The Two, Your Life And Your Work. The Second Is Only Part Of The First.

I Am An Affirmative Action Hire.

Affirmative Action

The Problem With Freedom Is That You Just Can't Go Back. Once People See What It Means To Be Free People, You Can't Go Back. So They're Going To Keep Nattering On About This And That, And Maybe They'll Make Another Stab At De-funding The Fabulous Planned Parenthood Or Something Of The Sort. To My Mind, It's Just Not Going To Work.

When I Write A Novel, I Have What I Think Of As An Icon That Helps Get Me Into The World Of The Book.

One Of The Things That Got Me On This Topic For This Book Was That When I Was Researching The Column I Wrote In 2009 Saying That I Was Stepping Down From My Column At "newsweek" Because I Wanted To Make Room For Newer, Fresh Voices Out There, I Discovered That In The Year I Was Born, 1952, The Average Life Expectancy Of An American Was 68. I Was Shocked By That Figure And Every Time I Mention It I Hear A Gasp From Somebody In The Crowd. Now, Of Course, We're More Or Less At 80, So That Means That We've Gotten 12 Additional Years.

A Finished Person Is A Boring Person.

On Social Welfare The Church Does So Much Good Around The World - Nuns Running Schools And Homeless Shelters, Priests Ministering To People Who Are In Crisis.

I Hadn't Written A Love Story Before And I Hadn't Written A Novel With A Happy Ending Before.

I Learned That If I Ever Claim Sexual Harassment, I Will Be Confronted With Every Bozo I Once Dated, Every Women I Once Impressedas Snotty And Superior, And Together They Will Provide A Convenient Excuse To Disbelieve Me.

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 System, Whether It's A Magazine, Book Or Blog, People Like Vivid Writing, Strong Stories And Credible People. So While The Venue Is Changing Rapidly, Human Nature Isn't, Which I Find Soothing.

By The Time You Kill And Mount What You Catch, It Has Lost That Very Thing That Made It Worth Having. I Knew This Only As A Vague Sense Of Disappointment At Age 10; Not Until Later Did I Recognize It As A Metaphor For Much Of Life.

We've Made Hyper Motherhood A Measure Of Female Success.

Women Who Marry Early Are Often Overly Enamored Of The Kind Of Man Who Looks Great In Wedding Pictures And Passes The Maid Of Honor His Telephone Number.

However, There Will Be A Republican Party Platform That Will Coalesce Around Their Convention. Unless I Miss My Guess, It Will Be Considerably More Conservative On These Issues, Perhaps Even Than Governor Romney Is, And I Think That That Will Give Americans A Clear Set Of Choices About All Issues, But About Women's Issues Too.

So Much Of What You Take For Granted Is The Bedrock Of Happiness.

A Life Of Unremitting Caution, Without The Carefree - Or Even, Occasionally, The Careless - May Turn Out To Be Half A Life.

All Of Life Like A Series Of Tableaux, And In The Living We Missed So Much, Hid So Much, Left So Much Undone And Unsaid.

When You Leave College, There Are Thousands Of People Out There With The Same Degree You Have; When You Get A Job, There Will Be Thousands Of People Doing What You Want To Do For A Living. But You Are The Only Person Alive Who Has Sole Custody Of Your Life.

Consider The Lilies Of The Field. Look At The Fuzz On A Baby's Ear. Read In The Backyard With The Sun On Your Face. Learn To Be Happy. And Think Of Life As A Terminal Illness Because If You Do You Will Live It With Joy And Passion, As It Ought To Be Lived.

The Thing That Is Really Hard, And Really Amazing, Is Giving Up On Being Perfect And Beginning The Work Of Becoming Yourself.

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.

If An Opportunity Scares You, That's God's Way Of Saying You Should Jump At It.

She Say Guilt Is A Useless Emotion." "oh, Please," Says Nancy. "guilt Is What Separates Humans From Animals.

A Week In The Hospital She Had Told Us. A Hysterectomy, She Had Said. It Had Seemed Unremarkable To Me In A Woman Of Forty-six Long Finished With Childbearing, Although Every Day That I Grow Older I Realize There Is Never Anything Unremarkable About Losing Any Part Of What Makes You Female - A Breast, A Womb, A Child, A Man.

No One Thinks Anything Silly Is Suitable When They Are An Adolescent. Such An Enormous Share Of Their Own Behavior Is Silly That They Lose All Proper Perspective On Silliness, Like A Baker Who Is Nauseated By The Sight Of His Own Eclairs. This Provides Another Good Argument For The Emerging Theory That The Best Use Of Cryogenics Is To Freeze All Human Beings When They Are Between The Ages Of Twelve And Nineteen.

I Really Feel Like If You Can Get Past Your Fear, If You Can Say, "uh-uh, I'm Afraid To Do That And I'm Going To Do It Anyhow," That That's Really The Way To Have A Satisfying Life Moving Forward. I Think I Had That Kind Of Fearlessness Even As A Young Person. It Wasn't Tempered By Experience Or Wisdom, But It Took Me A Long Way.

I Will Never Understand People Who Think That The Way To Show Their Righteous Opposition To Sexual Freedom Is To Write Letters Full Of Filthy Words.

We Take Our Vitamins, We Go To Exercise Class, We Put On Our Seat Belts. And Then Something Blindsides Us And Gives The Lie To Our Carefully Constructed Facade Of Safety.

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 Said, "we Want To De-fund Planned Parenthood," He Said, "not Going To Happen." Those Apparently Were More Or Less His Exact Words.

Not Writing At All Leads To Nothing.

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 Life Is Glorious, And That You Have No Business Taking It For Granted.

If I Waited Long Enough And Said, "okay, So What You're Saying Is You Liked Your Life A Lot Better When You Were 30?" Everybody Would Get Real Quiet And Then Admit That That Wasn't The Case, That They Really Felt Like They Were Sort Of Growing Into Themselves In A Way.

Recently A Young Mother Asked For Advice. What, She Wanted To Know, Was She To Do With A 7-year-old Who Was Obstreperous, Outspoken, And Inconveniently Willful? "keep Her," I Replied.... The Suffragettes Refused To Be Polite In Demanding What They Wanted Or Grateful For Getting What They Deserved. Works For Me.

People Ask Me All The Time If I'm From A Family Of Writers. The Literal Short Answer Is No, But My Father And His Brothers And Sisters And His Mother Are All People Who Would Sit Around With A Tom Collins And Tell Stories That Seemed To Get Better And Better Each Time They Told Them.

I Read And Walked For Miles At Night Along The Beach, Writing Bad Blank Verse And Searching Endlessly For Someone Wonderful Who Would Step Out Of The Darkness And Change My Life. It Never Crossed My Mind That That Person Could Be Me.

People Who Are Knowledgeable About Poetry Sometimes Discuss It In That Knowing, Rather Hateful Way In Which Oenophiles Talk About Wine: Robust, Delicate, Muscular. This Has Nothing To Do With How Most Of Us Experience It, The Heart Coming Around The Corner And Unexpectedly Running Into The Mind. Of All The Words That Have Stuck To The Ribs Of My Soul, Poetry Has Been The Most Filling.

Stereotypes Fall In The Face Of Humanity. We Human Beings Are Best Understood One At A Time.

I Love Having A President Who I Think Is Smarter Than I Am.

I Feel About Exercise The Same Way That I Feel About A Few Other Things: That There Is Nothing Wrong With It If It Is Done In Private By Consenting Adults.

The Unemployment Rate Among The Young In The United States Is Still Very Disconcerting, Although We All Know It's Nowhere Near As Bad As It Is In Some Of The European Countries, Where In Some Places It Approaches 50 Percent.

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 And Still Have At Your Core A Strength So Great That You Never Even Needed To Put It On Display.

Being A Reporter Is As Much A Diagnosis As A Job Description.

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-now Banal Head; You Say "underedited," I Say "derivative." The Conversation Goes Around And Around Various Literary Criticisms, And By The Time It Moves On One Thing Is Clear: No One Read The Book; We Just Read The Reviews.

I Know The Difference Now Between Dedication And Infatuation. That Doesn't Mean I Don't Still Get An Enormous Kick Out Of Infatuation;: The Exciting Ephemera, The Punch In The Stomach, The Adrenaline To The Heart.

You Are The Only Person Alive Who Has Sole Custody Of Your Life ... Your Entire Life ... Not Just The Life Of Your Mind, But The Life Of Your Heart. Not Just Your Bank Account, But Your Soul.

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 Really Feel Like I'm A Liberal Because I'm A Catholic, Because I Took The Words Of The New Testament To Heart.

I Know That It's Very Dispiriting For People In Their Twenties, Who Expected To Graduate From College, Get Their Own Apartments, Get A Job, And Move Forward With Their Lives, And In Fact Are Still Now Living With Mom And Dad, Which Is Challenging For All Involved.

Americans Like Warm Characters. It's Why, No Matter What He Did In The Early Days, They Kind Of Resonated To Bill Clinton Because He Seems Like A Guy That You Could Sit Down And Have A Burger And A Beer With. It's Even Why, Despite The Fact That He Sometimes Seemed To Be Not Firing On All Cylinders, Lots Of Them Still Like George W. Bush - Because He Seemed Like The Kind Of Guy You Could Have A Burger And A Beer With.

Don't Ever Forget The Words On A Postcard That My Father Sent Me Last Year: "if You Win The Rat Race, You're Still A Rat.

For Many Years, Despite What I Thought Were Really Punitive Decisions About Women In The Church, I Stayed And Stayed And Stayed. I Kept Saying To Myself, "the Catholic Church Is My Church, And By God, I'm Going To Stay Here, Despite What The Hierarchy Does."

I Sometimes Think That Courage Is The Thing That You Need More Than Any Other Thing. It's Fear That Cripples Us. It's Fear That Accounts For Racism, It's Fear That Accounts For Sexism, For Xenophobia.

I've Been A Feminist Since I Was A Teenager, But Originally It Was Because I Wanted To Make The World A Better Place For Me.

The Future Is Built On Brains, Not Prom Court, As Most People Can Tell You After Attending Their High School Reunion. But You'd Never Know It By Talking To Kids Or Listening To The Messages They Get From The Culture And Even From Their Schools.

There's No Greater Happiness Than Doing Something Every Day That You Love, That You Feel You Do In A Satisfactory Fashion, And Which Both Supports And Gives You Time To Support Your Family. I Felt So Lucky To Have All That.

There's Something Undeniable About The Posture Of A Person Trying Not To Acknowledge Your Existance

The Beginning And The End Are Never Really The Journey Of Discovery For Me. It Is The Middle That Remains A Puzzle Until Well Into The Writing. That's How Life Is Most Of The Time, Isn't It? You Know Where You Are And Where You Hope To Wind Up. It's The Getting There That's Challenging.

Parents Have Railed Against Shelters Near Schools, But No One Has Made Any Connection Between The Crazed Consumerism Of Our Kids And Their Elders' Cold Unconcern Toward Others. Maybe The Homeless Are Not The Only Ones Who Need To Spend Time In These Places To Thaw Out.

I Don't Know What I Would Do In The World Without [female Friends] For Advice, For Comfort, For Simply Knowing That There Is Someone Out There Who Knows Me As I Am, And Loves Me Despite And Because Of It.

Whether Talking About Addiction, Taxation [on Cigarettes] Or Education [about Smoking], There Is Always At The Center Of The Conversation An Essential Conundrum: How Come We're Selling This Deadly Stuff Anyway?

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 These Tough Times. A Lot Of Them Are More Active, A Lot Of Them Are Still Working, Which Was Not The Case When Our Grandparents Were In Their Sixties.

Books Are The Plane, And The Train, And The Road. They Are The Destination, And The Journey. They Are Home.

[in The Aftermath Of Death] Small Talk Feels Too Small, Big Talk Too Enormous.

Wow, So Much Of The Way I've Transacted My Life... So Much Of The Results That I'm Happy About Are Because Of What Daddy Did.

I'll Tell You The Truth - I Went To A Women's College, Barnard, The Most Selective College For Women In America Today. If There's One Thing I Came Out Of Barnard With, Because It Was A Women's College And A Great Institution Of Higher Education, It Was Fearlessness.

I Got A Fortune Cookie That Said, "to Remember Is To Understand." I Have Never Forgotten It. A Good Judge Remembers What It Was Like To Be A Lawyer. A Good Editor Remembers Being A Writer. A Good Parent Remembers What It Was Like To Be A Child.

I Don't Really Read What People Write About Me. Someone Gives My Novel One Star; Are They A Troll? Are They Someone Who Hates My Politics And So Has Decided To Do That?

Now, A Lot Of People Are Challenged By The Fact That A Record Number Of People In Their Sixties Have Living Parents, And A Record Number Of People In Their Sixties Have Kids Who May Still Depend Upon Them.

Maybe Crazy Is Just The Word We Use For Feelings That Will Not Be Contained.

I Learned To Love The Journey, Not The Destination. I Learned That This Is Not A Dress Rehearsal, And That Today Is The Only Guarantee You Get.

The World Is Full Of Women Blindsided By The Unceasing Demands Of Motherhood, Still Flabbergasted By How A Job Can Be Terrific Andtorturous, Involving And Utterly Tedious, All At The Same Time. The World Is Full Of Women Made To Feel Strange Because What Everyone Assumes Comes Naturally Is So Difficult To Do--never Mind To Do Well.

February Is A Suitable Month For Dying. Everything Around Is Dead, The Trees Black And Frozen So That The Appearance Of Green Shoots Two Months Hence Seems Preposterous, The Ground Hard And Cold, The Snow Dirty, The Winter Hateful, Hanging On Too Long.

Your Children Make It Impossible To Regret Your Past. They're Its Finest Fruits. Sometimes The Only Ones.

I Never Think About Issues When I'm Working On A Novel. Issues Are Things That Happen To People In Sufficient Numbers To Elicit Widespread Attention; In Other Words, They're Just Life Happening. That's What I Think About: Life, And Telling A Story.

I Always Have Music On Unless I'm Reading Aloud, Which I Always Do Before I Hand Anything In. It's The Only Way To Know If A Sentence Really Works, Without Clunks Or Cul-de-sac Clauses.

These Are My Words; This Is Their World, A World In Which We Can Wear Our Gender On Our Sleeves, Unabashedly, As We Go About The Business Of Thinking Out Loud.

The Reason Child Care Is Such A Loaded Issue Is That When We Talk About It, We Are Always Tacitly Talking About Motherhood. And When We're Talking About Motherhood We're Always Tacitly Assuming That Child Care Must Be A Very Dim Second To Full-time Mother Care.

You're Like A Cake When You're Young. You Can't Rush It Or It Will Fall, Or Just Turn Out Wrong. Rising Takes Patience, And Heat.

You Write To Suit Some Sense In Yourself And Trust That That Will Resonate With A Certain Wider Readership.

Women Are The Glue That Holds Our Day-to-day World Together.

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 Think And You Don't Trust Yourself To Be Able To Talk To Them.

Our Love Of Lockstep Is Our Greatest Curse, The Source Of All That Bedevils Us. It Is The Source Of Homophobia, Xenophobia, Racism, Sexism, Terrorism, Bigotry Of Every Variety And Hue, Because It Tells Us There Is One Right Way To Do Things, To Look, To Behave, To Feel, When The Only Right Way Is To Feel Your Heart Hammering Inside You And To Listen To What Its Timpani Is Saying.

Those Of Us Who Read Because We Love It More Than Anything, Who Feel About Bookstores The Way Some People Feel About Jewelers.

It's What The Taliban Does In Afghanistan, It's What Gets Done In The Middle East, And It's Clearly Something That Certain Mainly Conservative Groups In The United States Would Like To Do. They Miss The Good Old Days, When Men Were Men And Women Were Nothing.

Each Instance Of Sexual Harassment Has To Be Judged On Its Merits. Facts, Timing, Motives, Credibility: All Must Be Considered Before We Make Up Our Own Minds What To Believe.

I'm A Catholic Of The New Testament, I'm Not A Catholic Of The Hierarchy.

Fifty Years Ago, Teachers Said Their Top Discipline Problems Were Talking, Chewing Gum, Making Noise, And Running In The Halls. The Current List, By Contrast, Sounds Like A Cross Between A Rap Sheet And The Seven Deadly Sins.

This Is Why I Had Children: To Offer Them A Perfect Dream Of Childhood That Can Fill Their Souls As They Grow Older.

The 1992 Us Olympic Basketball Team Is The Best Sports Team Ever, The Equivalent Of Rounding Up The Greatest American Writers Of The Last Century Or So And Watching Them Collaborate: 'ok, Twain, You Do The Dialogue And Hand Off To Faulkner. He'll Do The Interior Monologue. Hemingway Will Edit - No, Don't Make That Face, You Know You Overwrite. And Be Nice To Cheever. He's Young, But He's Got A Good Ear. Wharton And Cather Can't Play - They're Girls.'

Life Is Made Up Of Moments, Small Pieces Of Glittering Mica In A Long Stretch Of Gray Cement. It Would Be Wonderful If They Came To Us Unsummoned, But Particularly In Lives As Busy As The Ones Most Of Us Lead Now, That Won’t Happen. We Have To Teach Ourselves How To Make Room For Them, To Love Them, And To Live, Really Live.

In Life, The Classroom Is Everywhere. The Exam Comes At The Very End.

My Most Pronounced Writing Habit Is Trying Not To Write.

I'm Very Optimistic. I Think If You Would Describe Me, My Pretty Consistent Affect Is That I'm A Pretty Happy Person.

My Father Really, Really Pushed Me To Excel In A Way That I Resented For Years And Then Realized Had Really Worked For Me.

More Than A Decade After Our Fellow Citizens Began Bedding Down On The Sidewalks, Their Problems Continue To Seem So Intractable That We Have Begun To Do Psychologically What Government Has Been Incapable Of Doing Programmatically. We Bring The Numbers Down--not By Solving The Problem, But By Deciding It's Their Own Damn Fault.

I Do A Lot Of Mental Work Before I Ever Start Writing.

If You Want Something, It Will Elude You. If You Do Not Want Something, You Will Get Ten Of It In The Mail.

There Is Only Room In The Lifeboat Of Your Life For One, And You Always Choose Yourself, And Turn Your Parents Into Whatever It Takes To Keep You Afloat.

There Is A Little Boy Inside The Man Who Is My Brother... Oh, How I Hated That Little Boy. And How I Love Him Too.

I Believe That In A Contest Between The Living And The Almost Living, The Latter Must, If Necessary, Give Way To The Will Of The Former.

It Is So Easy To Exist Instead Of Live.

It Is So Easy To Waste Our Lives: Our Days, Our Hours, Our Minutes. It Is So Easy To Take For Granted The Pale New Growth On An Evergreen, The Sheen Of The Limestone On Fifth Avenue, The Colour Of Our Kids’ Eyes, The Way The Melody In A Symphony Rises And Falls And Disappears And Rises Again. It Is So Easy To Exist Instead Of Live. Unless You Know There Is A Clock Ticking.

Like Cellulite Creams Or Hair-loss Tonics, Capital Punishment Is One Of Those Panaceas That Isn't. Only It Costs A Whole Lot More.

Your Kids Are Launched. You Love Your Work But You Understand How To Place It In The Panorama Of The Rest Of Your Life. There's This Line In The Book, And When I Wrote It I Thought Yes, That's It - If You Think Of Life As A Job, Maybe By The Time You Get To, Say, In My Case, 60, You've Finally Gotten Good At It.

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 Moment.

We're Tortured, A Lot Of Us, Believe Me.

When Hot Dogs Like Mr. D'amato Or The Republican Apologist Roger Ailes Say That Whitewater Is Worse Than Watergate, It's Because They're Suffering From A Disease. It's Called Bull-imia, And It's The Regurgitation Of Patent Hyperbole.

Every Reader, I Suspect, Has A Book Like This Somewhere In His Or Her Past, A Book That Seemed To Hold Within It, At That Moment, All The Mysteries Of The Universe.

I Can't Think Of Anything To Write About Except Families. They Are A Metaphor For Every Other Part Of Society.

When You Look At The Women That Have Made A Real Difference In The World Throughout History, What They’ve Done Has Almost Always Been Defined By Fearlessness. That’s Something I Came To At A Certain Point; I Wish I’d Come To It Younger. Stop Looking Over Your Shoulder — There’s Nobody Who Matters Back There.

I Sort Of Feel Like It Comes Around Again. That When You Get To A Certain Age, When You've Lived Enough And You've Got Your Friends To Support You And Your Family To Support You, You Wake Up One Morning And Think, Yeah, I'm Okay.

People Who Wish To Salute The Free And Independent Side Of Their Evolutionary Character Acquire Cats. People Who Wish To Pay Homage To Their Servile And Salivating Roots Own Dogs.

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 Those Of Us Who Define Living Not By Whether The Heart Beats And The Lungs Lift But Whether The Spirit Is There, Whether The Music Box Plays.

A Man Who Builds His Own Pedestal Had Better Use Strong Cement.

... It Was The Idea Of Facing A Future Skimming The Surface Of Life, Winging My Way In And Out Of Other People's Crises, Confusions, And Passages, Engaging Them Enough To Get The Story, But Never Enough To Be Indelibly Touched By What I Had Seen Or Heard.

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 That Are Important To Understand But Never Really Go To The Heart Of The Matter: I Believe I Will Say That When You Sleep With Someone You Take Off A Lot More Than Your Clothes.

Barack Obama Presents As Kind Of A Cool Character, And I Think That That's His Natural Personality.

Here Is One Of The Worst Things About Having Someone You Love Die: It Happens Again Every Single Morning.

Someone You Love

Adolescence Is A Tough Time For Parent And Child Alike. It Is A Time Between: Between Childhood And Maturity, Between Parental Protection And Personal Responsibility, Between Life Stage- Managed By Grown-ups And Life Privately Held.

I Think The Last Couple Of Years Of Life For Many, Many People Are The Same As They Were 50, 60, 70 Years Ago. They Could Be Really Tough Because Of Infirmity.

All Things Being Equal, I Would Choose A Woman Over A Man In Order To Even The Balance Of Power, To Insinuate A Different Perspective Into The Process, To Give Young Women Something To Shoot For And Someone To Look Up To. But All Things Are Rarely Equal.

On The Other Hand, I Think That Governor Romney Has To Worry That His Turnout Is Going To Be Low, That He Is Not Going To Bring Out The Evangelicals, That He Is Not Going To Bring Out The Tea Party Stalwarts. If He Does Not, Then It's Pretty Clear That He Will Lose The Election. So I Think Turnout In Key Groups Is Going To Be Really, Really Key On Election Day.

I Learned To Live Many Years Ago. Something Really, Really Bad Happened To Me, Something That Changed My Life In Ways That, If I Had My Druthers, It Would Never Have Been Changed At All. What I Learned From It Is That Today Seems To Be The Hardest Lesson Of All. I Learned To Love The Journey, Not The Destination. I Learned That It Is Not A Dress Rehearsal, And That Today Is The Only Guarantee You Get. I Learned To Look At All The Good In The World And To Try To Give Some Of It Back Because I Believed In It Completely And Utterly.

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