In addition to the research I enjoyed learning French and assimilating the culture of another country.

Whatever the medium there is the difficulty challenge fascination and often productive clumsiness of learning a new method: the wonderful puzzles and problems of translating with new materials.

The Tea Party was born out of the disgust many Americans felt early in the financial crisis upon learning that the federal government was even contemplating reducing the principal on some troubled mortgages.

In England only uneducated people show off their knowledge nobody quotes Latin or Greek authors in the course of conversation unless he has never read them.

Knowledge is like money: to be of value it must circulate and in circulating it can increase in quantity and hopefully in value.

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants crowded together around the Hill blackening the ground that you begin to see the whole beast and now you observe it thinking planning calculating. It is an intelligence a kind of live computer with crawling bits for its wits.

Ironically Latin American countries in their instability give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed.

My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.

When you put something out there into the world there's all these words you don't want to hear that you hope people don't say. I don't like anything that starts with 're' - like retro reinvent recreate - I hate that. It's always like living in the past - copying emulating.

The hope of a new politics does not lie in formulating a left-wing reply to the right-it lies in rejecting conventional political categories.