"Also, I need deadlines, just like everybody else, especially coming from magazines, newspapers, and stuff like that. I need daily or weekly deadlines to get stuff done, or I continue to do things and not go off on a year of unproductivity."

"I think I'm far too hopeful and trusting. That's something I got from my mum."

"You can do and use the skills that you have. The schools need you. The teachers need you. Students and parents need you. They need your actual person: your physical personhood and your open minds and open ears and boundless compassion, sitting next to them, listening and nodding and asking questions for hours at a time."

"I'm interested in the human impact of the giant foot of misplaced government. After all, we encounter it every day."

"I don't watch a huge amount of telly. I read a lot. I'm reading at the moment 'Freedom,' by Jonathan Franzen, a great big brick of a book, and I'm loving it."

"Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later."

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."

"My generation of bossy, confident, baby-boom women were something brand new in history. Our energy and assertiveness weren't created by Betty Friedan, unknown before her 1963 book, or by Gloria Steinem, whose political activism, as even the Lifetime profile admitted, did not begin until 1969."