My mother was a stay-at-home mom until I was about 11, when she got a job - and it was like a light came on inside her. It's not wrong to be passionate about your career. When you love what you do, you bring that stimulation back to your family.

It's not easy to reach the summit of your career by the age of 24 - and for the years after to be a humiliating scrabble downhill.

My son was about five or six months old, and he was ill, and I was sent to New York to interview three people back to back. I got home, and I saw my baby. He had been very ill, and he was on three kinds of antibiotics. I'd been away for eight days. I looked at him and thought, 'What am I doing? I'm a terrible mother and a terrible journalist.'

One thing that did give me pause for thought, when I told my female friends now that I was writing about a 13-year-old girl, without exception they all said, 'I would not go back to being 13 for a million pounds.'

All things being equal, letting people make decisions for themselves will produce smarter outcomes, collectively, than relying on government planners.

The America I know is great - not because government made it great but because ordinary citizens like me, like my father and like you are given the opportunity every day to do extraordinary things.

The Boston College community took a personal interest in my success, not only as a student but as a human being.

I don't think my success or me having the opportunity to have success is from our generation. I think it's from the generations before us. I think it's the fact that people like Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers and people like that fought for us to have the freedom to do and say what we want and have the opportunity to make money.