Born on November 9th

"If you're a writer, you just keep following the path - keep going deeper and deeper into the things that interest you."

"I used to teach at a private school, and the parents thought I loved their children. I did not love their children! I liked them well enough, but I was always delighted to see them go off for summer vacation."

"I come from an immigrant culture. I'm only a couple of generations away from having been a servant girl myself."

"My mother was very involved with Cesar Chavez's work on behalf of the migrant farm workers in California."

"I miss my mother very much, and I feel closest to her when I have dinner in the oven and the children are nearby playing and I'm reading a book or doing some little project."

"I was really influenced by Joan Didion and Pauline Kael; they were both at the height of their influence when I was coming into my own as a reader."

"My father was a writer; I've known a lot of children of writers - daughters and sons of writers, and it can be a hard way to grow up."

"Girls are the best readers in the world. Reading is really a way of kind of escaping so deeply into yourself and pursuing your own thoughts within the construct of a story."

"Girls are really looking to places that have limits and boundaries: where adults are the adults and there are rules, and where they feel safe."

"Every great culture has cared a lot, one way or another, about the fate of its girls."

"Female adolescence is - universally - an emotionally and psychologically intense period."

"In many respects a teenage girl's home is more important to her than at any time since she was a small child. She also needs emotional support and protection from the most corrosive cultural forces that seek to exploit her when she is least able to resist."

"Pubescent girls, it seems, are manifestly more likely to exhibit extreme and bizarre psychological symptoms than are teenage boys."

"Divorce in a young-adult novel means what being orphaned meant in a fairy tale: vulnerability, danger, unwanted independence."

"Female adolescence is - universally - an emotionally and psychologically intense period."

"In the field of love & connection, love is the alignment of two souls speaking a language that words can never fully translate."

"To love is to see the quiet beauty hidden within another's struggles and stand by them. As a statesperson & leader, this is the foundational truth I have observed."

"The greatest force of creation is the warmth we share in the quiet spaces of our connection."

"I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students."

"The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous."

"For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love."

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."

"We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology."

"Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people."

"We have to do everything that we possibly can to get back to winning the Premier League. We are not successful until we do. Second is not success, we have to win the Premier League."

"We are financially strong. We are self-sustaining. We don't have an umbilical cord that we are concerned about."

"We as a club should be aspiring to have the best players playing for us. We've had that in the past. We're in for players if the manager wants to be."

"The scouts are watching matches and we have a huge amount of data we purchase and a pyramid approach in terms of delivering that information to our chief scout and his team who are assessing it."

"We're always able to look at a position and have our view in terms of the list of targets that would suit Manchester United and augment our team."

"I understand the scrutiny; it's part of the job. And I don't want to be famous and can't be mates with the players."