My mother believed in curses, karma, good luck, bad luck, feng shui. Her amorphous set of beliefs showed me you can pick and choose the qualities of your philosophy, based on what works for you.

For books I want to keep reading, it's definitely the voice. It must be a voice I've never heard before, and it must have its own particular intelligence. By 'voice,' I don't mean vernacular. It has to have its own particular history and world that it inhabits.

I have a writer's memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.

Who knows where inspiration comes from. Perhaps it arises from desperation. Perhaps it comes from the flukes of the universe, the kindness of the muses.

If the Republicans get control back of the United States Senate, we will no longer have a check and balance on the White House, on the Republican Congress.

In addition to the decline in competition, American politics today is characterized by a growing ideological polarization between the two major political parties.

There is an extensive body of writing from both sides of the political aisle that has analyzed the extraordinary depths of hatred leveled at former President George W. Bush.

Senegal needs to free itself, to rediscover its democracy.