In the era of Venus Williams, girliness and goo isn't the way to every woman's heart. Yet publishers presume that women only buy a book that looks soft and that appears to be all about women, even if it isn't. Yet women, unlike men, buy books by and about both sexes.

Life's most underrated emotion is self-pity.

Oddly, for a book to do well merely because people like it is surprisingly rare.

As a child, I was always a sucker for anything in miniature, and it didn't have to be a dress: a desk, a Matchbox truck. Perhaps a childhood attraction to shrunken but compellingly realistic facsimiles is commonplace, if only because children themselves are compellingly realistic facsimiles of the giants who rule their world.

Tory supporters are not spontaneously ashamed; they have been made to feel ashamed. British leftists fiercely believe they are right - in the sense of correct but also in the sense of just. Conservatives likewise believe they are right-as-in-correct. Yet Tories are less confident about whether their politics are right-as-in-just.

The absence of doll babies in my toy chest didn't seriously influence my later decision not to become a mother; rather, I disdained Hasbro's Baby Alive wetting doll because I was already the kind of girl who would grow up to be childless by choice.

Lot of my life is involved in the 12-step program and the church.

Great innovators like Thomas Alva Edison, Henry Ford, and Andrew Carnegie didn't rely on government. There was hardly any of it in those days. More recently, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison used genius to put brand-new ideas into production.

Does anybody remember, back in the depths of the recession of 1981-82, how President Reagan kept his chin up and exhorted American businesses to work hard and produce an economic recovery?

Americans will always vote for prosperity.

Enforcing trade deals is spot on. Acting in the interest of American workers is correct. But large-scale tariffs are a terrible idea.

Tax reform likely will be the first policy action in a Trump administration. A close second will be a thorough repeal and rewrite of Obamacare, restoring a freer market with true consumer choice and competition among providers.

In the past, I have been an immigration reformer, not a restrictionist.

Here's what we must do: Completely reform the vetting process for immigrants and foreign visitors. Change the screening process. Come up with a new visa-application review process. Stop this nonsense of marriage-visa fraud. And in the meantime, seal the borders.

I have been accused of allegedly giving up my free-market principles in supporting some of Donald Trump's proposed policies.

It is freedom that makes this the greatest country in the world. And it is freedom that so frequently keeps me on the optimistic side of life.

While the Pence-Hutchinson immigration reform idea is not perfect, it does represent a useful discussion point for future action. As diplomatically and kindly as possible, with all the greatest respect for differing points of view, let me just say that the Tancredo-Buchanan attack on Mike Pence is nuttier than a fruitcake.

Yes, there should be tough border security. Yes, there should be foolproof ID cards, with biometrics, for Social Security and employment purposes.

Former Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming, the co-author of the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli immigration reform bill, has said the failure of that bill was a function of the lack of an ID card system.

I'm a person who has a hard time saying no, and it gets me into trouble because I sometimes overreach.

New WikiLeaks-provided e-mails from Clinton aide Doug Band reveal the true nature of the Clinton cash operation: No matter what the stated humanitarian goals of the Clinton Foundation, every fiber and sinew of the organization is wrapped in self-dealing, self-enrichment, fraud, and corruption.

After World War II, we awoke to find our wartime ally, Stalin, had emerged as a greater enemy than Germany or Japan. Stalin's empire stretched from the Elbe to the Pacific.

Trump has the opportunity to be the president who, like Harry Truman, redirected U.S. foreign policy for a generation.

Trump promised an 'America First' foreign policy rooted in the national interest, not in nostalgia.