We don't tend to write about disease in fiction - ...

Teenage readers also have a different relationship with the authors whose work they value than adult readers do. I loved Toni Morrison, but I don't have any desire to follow her on Twitter. I just want to read her books.

In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.

Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.

Look, the center right coalition in American politics today is best understood as a coalition of groups and individuals that on the issue that brings them to politics what they want from the government is to be left alone.

I believe in incentivizing people. If you can incentivize people in anything, whether it's in politics in life in spirituality in business just take care of folks. Incentivize them and all of a sudden it's amazing the difference that you'll see.

Some say that the age of chivalry is past, that the spirit of romance is dead. The age of chivalry is never past, so long as there is a wrong left unredressed on earth.

By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.

Think back to yourself at age 18. I know I was mighty different than the Patti I am today. As we grow up, we grow out of our haircuts, our apartments and - often times - our romantic decisions.

I think I meant that, given the circumstances of my childhood, I had the illusion that it's easier to be alone. To have your relationships be casual and also to pose as a solitary person, because it was more romantic. You know, I was raised on the idea of the ramblin' man and the loner.

As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well, as it turned out, I never wrote a great novel, sadly, and I never converted to Catholicism, happily, but I did do one thing he did. That is, in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be.

I'm a teenager, but I'm independent - I have my own apartment, I have my own life. And I think I have learned more than any of those teenagers have in school. I learned to be responsible, leaving my family and coming here alone.

I have always had a sense that we are all pretty much alone in life, particularly in adolescence.

Being a teenager is an amazing time and a hard time. It's when you make your best friends - I have girls who will never leave my heart and I still talk to. You get the best and the worst as a teen. You have the best friendships and the worst heartbreaks.