"In any story, the villain is the catalyst. The hero's not a person who will bend the rules or show the cracks in his armor. He's one-dimensional intentionally, but the villain is the person who owns up to what he is and stands by it."

"My first memories of religion were being taken to Episcopal church. My father was Catholic, but my mother, I believe, was Episcopal. So I sort of veered off into the watered-down version of Catholicism."

"If what you do is being threatened as a profession, that could be scary. But that's the same reason why I walked out on stage many times after receiving death threats. I couldn't live without doing what I wanted to do. So at the same time I have to be willing to die for it."

"I'm absolutely not looking for someone who agrees with me about everything or someone who wants to please me by believing what I believe."

"Your computer needn't be the first thing your see in the morning and the last thing you see at night."

"The problem with public school is not overcrowding in the classroom. The problem is not teacher unions. The problem is not underfunding or lack of computer equipment. The problem is your damn kids."

"Roman civilization had achieved, within the bounds of its technology, relatively as great a mastery of time and space as we have achieved today."

"I will tell you what I can't abide - and I think the Internet has really created a space for it - women criticizing other women and mothers criticizing other mothers."