Frank Capra made a series of films during World War II called 'Why We Fight' that explored America's reasons for entering the war. Today, with our troops engaged in Iraq and elsewhere for reasons far less clear, I think it's crucial to ask the questi...
Since World War II, most of the conflicts in the world have been internal conflicts. The weapon of choice in those wars has all too often been landmines - to such a degree that what we find today are tens of millions of landmines contaminating approx...
If I could have gotten my way at an early age, I would have entered the priesthood, but my mother informed me that I could not become a priest because I was a girl. It really was the biggest blow to my ego, because it was my calling. When she told me...
Try to be thoughtful, don't make the poor man say it; see how human he is, he has children of his own, it is your job to ask: And he will nod and say And now he can never not nod. And now he can never say no. And now he can never not say .
To quote the exceptional teacher Marva Collins, "I will is more important than IQ." It is wonderful to have a terrific mind, but it's been my experience that having outstanding intelligence is a very small part of the total package that leads to succ...
By the time these students enter the workforce, many of the jobs they will apply for ill be in industries that don't even exist yet. That's a hard future to prepare someone for. Teachers have their sights set on the real goal: not to produce Ivy Leag...
There are two kinds of books in the world--the boring kind they make you read in school and the interesting kind that they won't let you read in school because then they would have to talk about real stuff like sex and divorce and is there a God and ...
Everything beautiful is golden and strewn with pearls. Even golden people live here. But misfortune is a dark power, a monstrous, cannibalistic giant, who is, however, vanquished, because a good woman, who happily knows how to avert disaster, stands ...
'Boyz-n-the-Hood' was actually supposed to be written for Eazy's group. He had a group out in New York called Home Boys Only, called HBO. One of them looked like LL Cool J. Eazy wanted to write a song for them, a street song, like what we were doing ...
Our cultural discussion of fat bodies and how we clothe them has nothing to do with health concerns, the obesity epidemic, or the comfort of fat people. It has everything to do with what we expect from women, what we've been told by the fashion indus...
I can still remember. I was ill, and I was seven, and my father didn't want me to just read children's books. He came with Conan Doyle. I tried, and I liked it. I think the first I read was 'The Sign of the Four'; 'Study in Scarlet' was the next one....
I think I regard any history in quotes, because just like science, we're constantly revising science, we're constantly revising history. There's no question that various victors throughout history have flat out lied about certain events or written th...
I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity. Its record for being accurately predictive is really, really poor! If you look at the whole history of science fiction, what people have said is going to happe...
While novels are fiction, mine are usually very close to my heart. Like my other books, 'The Lemon Orchard' is inspired by something I care about. I care so deeply. The stories are my dreams, and I want to do a lot of research. Roberto is based on a ...
Another parent's different approach raises the possibility that you've made a mistake with your child. We simply can't tolerate that because we fear that any mistake, no matter how minor, could have devastating consequences. So we proclaim the superi...
When I was growing up I loved reading historical fiction, but too often it was about males; or, if it was about females, they were girls who were going to grow up to be famous like Betsy Ross, Clara Barton, or Harriet Tubman. No one ever wrote about ...
My father was famous for his photographic memory. He was in the OSS. They trained him to be captured on purpose and to read upside down and backwards and commit to memory every document in Germany he saw as he was being interrogated - every schedule ...
The true purpose of life is the perfection of humanity through individual effort, under the guidance of God's inspiration. Real life is response to the best within us. To be alive only to appetite, pleasure, pride, money-making, and not to goodness a...
Perhaps, indeed, there are no truly universal ethics: or to put it more precisely, the ways in which ethical principles are interpreted will inevitably differ across cultures and eras. Yet, these differences arise chiefly at the margins. All known so...
I would love to meet J.K. Rowling and tell her how much I admire her writing and am amazed by her imagination. I read every 'Harry Potter' book as it came out and looked forward to each new one. I am rereading them now with my kids and enjoying them ...
When I hit a block, regardless of what I am writing, what the subject matter is, or what's going on in the plot, I go back and I read Pablo Neruda's poetry. I don't actually speak Spanish, so I read it translation. But I always go back to Neruda. I d...
