Acting is glamour but writing is hard work, so I'm going to be an actress.

The second draft is on yellow paper, that's when I work on characterizations. The third is pink, I work on story motivations. Then blue, that's where I cut, cut, cut.

As a writer no one's gonna tell me how to write, I'm gonna write the way I wanna write!

I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature.

I wanted to write it long before I wrote Every Night, Josephine! I'd been thinking about it a long time.

As long as I don't have an idea, I won't write anything.

The substance of faith is a hope in the unseen.

Al-Qaeda has a kind of loose, almost entrepreneurial structure with lots of cells in various countries that are semi-independent.

I don't have to deal with the issues of the daily news cycle.

I've been a reporter for 20 years, and I don't ever get things wrong. That's important in terms of my professional status.

Message matters. Message matters almost as much as actions.

The fact is, I can vote for anybody; independents, Republicans, Democrats. But I'm a registered Democrat in the District of Columbia.

The fact is, most journalists I know are not particularly political. They move around a lot.

The informed, unmanaged question. That's the most dangerous thing at a press conference anywhere.

The media has become more forceful, has begun to recognize its traditional historic role and act on it, and truth is infectious.

Wars tend to be very public things, they are visible. There are correspondents traveling with the troops and you get daily dispatches.

All of the leading terrorism experts are clear on one thing: that in terms of protecting America, we are almost never going to know a place or a time of an attack.

By virtue of some of the ways the game is played, in terms of message discipline, in terms of access for reporters, and especially in the way that sources and subjects, especially famous subjects, treat the media, almost by default there's more news that's falling into books.

I absolutely reject that idea that the press is liberal and what it does is liberal. In my view, it's like accusing a doctor of malpractice or a lawyer of malfeasance.

If you write something that gets a bad response, or someone commits candor or is off message, there are often consequences almost immediately when it appears in the paper or a magazine, that somebody gets called into the boss's office. And sometimes it can result in a loss of access for the reporter.