I know that books I have written will still resonate in 50 years - particularly 'My Sister's Keeper.' It has sold three million copies in the States alone. I strongly feel that as a novelist you have a platform and the ability to change people's minds.

As strong as the United States is we can't deal with terrorism alone.

Had the United States and the United Kingdom gone on alone to capture Baghdad under the provisions of the Geneva and Hague conventions we would have been considered occupying powers and therefore would have been responsible for all the costs of maintaining or restoring government education and other services for the people of Iraq.

Too small is our world to allow discrimination bigotry and intolerance to thrive in any corner of it let alone in the United States of America.

To own the dominant or only newspaper in a mid-sized American city was for many decades a kind of license to print money. In the Internet age however no one has figured out how to rescue the newspaper in the United States or abroad.

Here's a proposal offered only partly in jest: no resident of the United States whether born here or abroad should get to be a citizen until age 18 at which time each such resident has to take a test.

The reality is sobering: in the United States one in three girls will become pregnant before age 20 totaling more than 750 000 girls per year.

I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age he wanted to be an Episcopal priest because he so admired his priest a black man from someplace called Haiti.