Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen
Anna Marie Quindlenis an American author, journalist, and opinion columnist whose New York Times column, Public and Private, won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1992. She began her journalism career in 1974 as a reporter for the New York Post. Between 1977 and 1994 she held several posts at The New York Times...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNon-Fiction Author
Date of Birth8 July 1952
CityPhiladelphia, PA
CountryUnited States of America
Ever since the Evil Empire turned out to be a collection of third-world countries, Americans aligned on the far right have tried to cast gay men and lesbians as the new enemy, calculating deviants seducing the nation's young, anti-Avon ladies selling sodomy door-to-door. This simply won't wash. Just as seeing the Russians up close and personal on television humanized them, so seeing the lesbian grandmother of two little girls wearing her gold medal with pride makes the notion of otherness, much less deviance, silly and ignorant.
The Statue of Liberty is meant to be shorthand for a country so unlike its parts that a trip from California to Indiana should require a passport.
America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by conflict between autonomy and security.
[President Johnson] had the political will to say that having one in five Americans living in the kind of abject conditions their fellow citizens associated with Third World countries and the novels of Dickens was as dangerous as any battlefield enemy.
The dark aftermath of the frontier, of the vast promise of possibility this country first offered, is an inflated sense of American entitlement today. We want what we want, and we want it now. Easy credit. Fast food. A straight shot down the interstate from point A to point B. The endless highway is crowded with the kinds of cars large enough to take a mountain pass in high snow. Instead they are used to take children from soccer practice to Pizza Hut. In the process they burn fuel like there's no tomorrow. Tomorrow's coming.
The unemployment rate among the young in the United States is still very disconcerting, although we all know it's nowhere near as bad as it is in some of the European countries, where in some places it approaches 50 percent.
I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.
It is difficult for me to imagine the same dedication to women's rights on the part of the kind of man who lives in partnership with someone he likes and respects, and the kind of man who considers breast-augmentation surgery self-improvement.
The truth about your own life is not always easy to accept, and sometimes hasn't even occurred to you.
I can't think of anything to write about except families. They are a metaphor for every other part of society.
There's a certain kind of conversation you have from time to time at parties in New York about a new book. The word "banal" sometimes rears its by-now banal head; you say "underedited," I say "derivative." The conversation goes around and around various literary criticisms, and by the time it moves on one thing is clear: No one read the book; we just read the reviews.
I've been a feminist since I was a teenager, but originally it was because I wanted to make the world a better place for me.
Over the last twenty years, we've changed the world just enough to make it radically different, but not enough to make it work.
You're like a cake when you're young. You can't rush it or it will fall, or just turn out wrong. Rising takes patience, and heat.