Americans born since World War II have grown up in a media-saturated environment. From childhood, we have developed a sort of advertising literacy, which combines appreciation for technique with skepticism about motives. We respond to ads with at least as much rhetorical intelligence as we apply to any other form of persuasion.

Scientists appear most often in horror movies. Through childlike curiosity or God-defying hubris, they unleash destructive forces they can't control - 'Forbidden Planet's Monsters of the Id.

Wars without military objectives have a tendency to go on forever.

Medicare is a monopoly: a central-planning bureaucracy grafted onto American health care. It exercises a stranglehold on the health care of all Americans over 65, and on the medical practices of almost all physicians. Medicare decides what is legitimate and what is not: which prices may be charged and which services may be rendered.

People say, 'What's the secret to a marriage?' There's no secret - I think you get lucky.

My first cousin, by the way, on my father's mother side was John Marshall Harlan, who was a Supreme Court justice, as was his grandson. And I think a lot of my fight and my work to struggle for fairness and the techniques of theater and in subject matter probably stems in some way from some sense I have of his issues in life.

The true story of how my husband, Stephen, and I exchanged our first 'I love you's' - chronicled in my 2012 memoir 'Brain on Fire' - occurred deep in a hallucinatory psychotic episode outside a crowded Maplewood, NJ, restaurant.

Writing can be a tough gig. Whenever you do something in which you put yourself out there - if that becomes the focus of your life, you miss the point of living. You've really got to get the grounding of family and the things that are important in your life and make that your focus.