For one, I think as a missionary you gotta be stubborn. And you gotta try to be persuasive.

I feel at some point that the farm state politics will overwhelm the Florida politics.

Many of the earmark request forms are actually filled out by lobbyists and then just turned in by the member's staff to the appropriations committee.

Our government shouldn't tell us where to travel and where not to travel.

The country is facing a fiscal crisis, and the United States Senate is at the center of the debate about how to bring federal spending under control.

There are some Republicans who say that any time you raise new revenue, you have to have a tax cut to match it. I am not one of those Republicans.

If we can't have the courage to tell our constituents, hey, we've got to cut back, then if we can point to something and say, I would like to vote for more benefits for you, but this balanced budget amendment or statutory spending cap or whatever the device is, is preventing me from doing it.

Senator Jon Kyl has given all of the eventual candidates in this race an excellent model of how to best serve Arizona and the country. He's set the bar extremely high, and I'll do my best to meet that standard.

Divorce in a young-adult novel means what being orphaned meant in a fairy tale: vulnerability, danger, unwanted independence.

Every great culture has cared a lot, one way or another, about the fate of its girls.

Female adolescence is - universally - an emotionally and psychologically intense period.

Girls are really looking to places that have limits and boundaries: where adults are the adults and there are rules, and where they feel safe.

I come from an immigrant culture. I'm only a couple of generations away from having been a servant girl myself.

I was really influenced by Joan Didion and Pauline Kael; they were both at the height of their influence when I was coming into my own as a reader.

If you're a writer, you just keep following the path - keep going deeper and deeper into the things that interest you.

My father was a writer; I've known a lot of children of writers - daughters and sons of writers, and it can be a hard way to grow up.

My mother was very involved with Cesar Chavez's work on behalf of the migrant farm workers in California.

Pubescent girls, it seems, are manifestly more likely to exhibit extreme and bizarre psychological symptoms than are teenage boys.

Girls are the best readers in the world. Reading is really a way of kind of escaping so deeply into yourself and pursuing your own thoughts within the construct of a story.

I miss my mother very much, and I feel closest to her when I have dinner in the oven and the children are nearby playing and I'm reading a book or doing some little project.