Susan Stamberg

I write that one of the things that cancer did was to affect my work and make me much more interested in people who faced up to something terrible and gone on with their lives.

You don't understand what learning from someone's courage is until you need those lessons.

Yeah, I guess so.

It's not so much a war as I... It's not a war I fight anymore.

I know what I will and what I won't speak about, and you hear the long pauses.

So that's... I know how to do that now.

And getting older...

makes that easier.

You know, Terry, my generation, we were raised as nice girls.

Philip Roth says this wonderfully, too, and there's somebody who sends him an angry letter and asks him for lunch, and he goes.

And I said to him, how come you went?

Why did you do that?

He said, I was young.

When summoned, I went.

Now, he wasn't raised as a nice girl, but I was.

You're asked a question, you answer it.

I don't leap to those answers quite as quickly now.

Maybe I've learned a kind of privacy and a professionalism.

And I also wonder, as I said, this sort of cult of personality has a short string as far as I'm concerned.

There are other things to talk about.