One thing I can say about George... he may not be able to keep a job, but he's not boring.

The state dinner is almost a formula, but you try to make it interesting. You try not to overload it with too many political types. You try to get a cross section.

Bias has to be taught. If you hear your parents downgrading women or people of different backgrounds, why, you are going to do that.

I decided I ought to pick a project that would not be controversial, that would not really cost the government a lot of money.

There's nothing illogical, it seems to me, about saying, 'I am going to care deeply about my work and my writing. I'm also going to care deeply about my family and my child.'

Childhood is a fundamental part of all human lives, parents or not, since that's how we all start out. And yet babies and young children are so mysterious and puzzling and even paradoxical.

My son, Wolf, was born when I was past 40 and the author of a best-selling novel. That means he has grown up a middle-class child - one who sometimes asks me for stories of my childhood but knows nothing of what it means to grow up poor and afraid. I have worked to make sure of that.

The idea that I have to be on the same side of the fence as Dan Quayle is cruelly depressing to me, but the truth is, I believe in family values.