Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers.

I believe that every person, male and female, needs to be in a protective mode at all times of alertness to potential danger. The world is full of potential attacks, potential disasters.

Feminism is dead. The movement is absolutely dead. The women's movement tried to suppress dissident voices for way too long. There's no room for dissent.

If colleges and universities are really concerned about women's rights, then they must adjust to a far more flexible structure to allow young women students to take leaves of absence if they want to have children early.

Going to university is, and should be, so much more than a mechanical process of grinding out a degree qualification for a pre-determined career path.

A novel is a relationship, you know? When you read a book, the writer has done half the work, and you're doing half the work. You're providing the imagination; the words are turning into pictures in your mind. There's an active relationship that's going on.

I’ve seen many dinosaur fossils, some mounted in museums, others in the process of being extracted from their rocky matrix, and it has never occurred to me that any could be anything other than genuine."

On the professional side, those 18 years on the farm instilled my love for agriculture.