It may be something to do with my having been to a girls' school, but I'm far more comfortable making male friendships than female ones. My friends tend to be men and their significant others.

My heroes and heroines are often unlikely people who are dragged into situations without meaning to become involved, or people with a past that has never quite left them. They are often isolated, introspective people, often confrontational or anarchic in some way, often damaged or secretly unhappy or incomplete.

From a very young age my mother persuaded me that I could write for fun, but I had to have a proper job - very good advice.

Online communities are an expression of loneliness.

But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns.

I think all Americans believe in human rights. And health is an often overlooked aspect of basic human rights. And it's one that's easily corrected. The reason I say that is that many of the diseases that we treat around the world, I knew when I was a child. My mother was a registered nurse. And they no longer exist in our country.

We're all fascinated by the way other people live their lives, how they cope with hardship and triumph, what they put in their home movies and family albums.

I saw a lot of children who were in the latest stages of malaria. Those kids died very quickly.