When I was growing up, my parents were almost involved in various volunteer things. My dad was head of Planned Parenthood. And it was very controversial to be involved with that.

Newspaper readership is still growing in India.

If you're using first-class land for biofuels, then you're competing with the growing of food. And so you're actually spiking food prices by moving energy production into agriculture.

Certainly I'll never be able to put myself in the situation that people growing up in the less developed countries are in. I've gotten a bit of a sense of it by being out there and meeting people and talking with them.

As authors, we all have to learn not to be reactive to public statements about our books. It's really not our business what each reader thinks of them.

Blogging and the Internet allow us to engage in a lot more real time conversations as opposed to a one-way dump of information or a message.

Success on the front of women's rights will look like a world not only with obvious advances - where no girl is denied access to education, for instance - but also one with more subtle changes in how we regard gender and gender stereotypes.

My being a teacher had a decisive influence on making language and systems as simple as possible so that in my teaching, I could concentrate on the essential issues of programming rather than on details of language and notation.