I'm a liberal to a degree, I want everybody to be free. But if you think that I'll let Barry Goldwater move in next door.
Motherhood. It was hard to get lost in anything else completely when children were 3 years old.
It’s funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, ‘I want to go home. ’ But then you come home, and of course it’s not the same. You can’t live with it, you can’t live away from it. And it seems like from then on there’s always this yearning for some place that doesn’t exist. I felt that. Still do. I’m never completely at home anywhere.
My fear was like a stray dog, roving the neighborhood of my life, looking for a new source of worry.
I think about some of the novels I love - The Stranger, Disgrace, Quicksand and Passing, Giovanni's Room, The Talented Mr. Ripley. I think I'm more intrigued by characters who don't do the right thing and where we are allowed to identify with their shamedishonestyenvy. . . whatever.
I was influenced growing up by everything from Harlequin romances to Fedor Dostoyevsky and Albert Camus, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and later Lydia Davis, Mary Gaitskill, bell hooks.
Writing New People I was thinking a lot about the era that I came of age - the 90's. Brooklyn, in particular, this moment when I lived there. The sense of possibility. I was also trying to find a way to write about Jonestown. I had read about it a lot and I had the sense that the story could really start to drive one over the edge.
I thanked the President [George W. Bush] for the steadfastness and resolve with which he's tackling the very complicated problems in the Middle East and Iraq, as well as the Israel-Palestinian issue. . . . It's critical for us in Southeast Asia that America does that. . . . because it affects America's standing in Asia and the world, and also the security environment in Asia because extremists, the jihadists, watch carefully what's happening in the Middle East and take heart, or lose heart, depending on what's happening.
The agricultural population, says Cato, produces the bravest men, the most valiant soldiers, and a class of citizens the least given of all too evil designs.
You're the hope in the morning, you're the light when the night is falling, you're the song when my heart is singing, it's your love!
But from this earth, this grave, this dust, My God shall raise me up, I trust.