Alissa Quart

“There's no better example of how to lead a difficult employee than to have a child. You have another kind of knowledge from your children that's actually applicable outside of childbearing.”

“If everybody is a Facebook friend, what is an actual friend?”

“When I was doing my research for 'Branded,' I'd meet groups of teenagers and preteenagers or tweens, and they would laugh at a magazine spread in a women's magazine or teen girl magazine and say, 'I'd never buy this outfit. I know these girls are starving themselves.' But they probably would go out and buy the thing eventually.”

“Sometimes I think that the public's lack of criticism of the rich - and how they seek their pleasure - might derive from the fact that Americans still believe they will one day be joining their number.”

“No matter how we name and dissect inequality, we must keep explaining the larger downside of such concentrated extreme wealth.”

“I go to see films at the multiplex because they are not good films, and so I don't have to think about things like death, social oppression, or yes, my fertility, while I watch them.”

“The middle class is a group defined by more than just money: it also leans on credentials, education, aspirations, assets, and, of course, household income.”

“I grew up in New York City and in London.”

“At the end of the day, the truth is that if - when - robots prevail, so many vocations will actually become close to impossible. Save for the profession of making robots, that is.”

“When I got pregnant with my daughter, both my husband and I were freelancers, and we didn't have that much security. We had savings. We were better off than many people, but we didn't have, you know, pensions and all the things that people used to have.”

“Parenting makes us better in so many regards.”

“The Southern California arena rock, hair metal, laidback hippie garden culture - for many growing up in the '70s and '80s, none of it made us who we were like Lou Reed did.”

“Low-cost gear can make restless people like myself feel marginally happier.”

“There is a psychological and physical toll from the pressure to recreate ourselves in midlife. To survive as workers, we have to deny, on some level, the realities of our bodies - bodies that age and give birth.”

“For the rich and powerful, pregnancy might not be an obstacle - it might even help one's career. But for the rest of us, it remains a hindrance.”

“We in America believe in starting over - and over and over.”

“The effect of robotization would be profoundly different if, say, truckers possessed their own autonomous vehicles rather than a corporation controlling them all.”

“As the world of independent feature filmmaking became increasingly commercialized by the mid-1990s, there was also a parallel, much more positive development: a resurgence in documentary filmmaking, thanks in part to the advent of the cheaper, lighter digital format that helped to offset the daunting costs of pursuing political aims through film.”

“One thing we're doing with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, the nonprofit I direct, is providing financial support to journalists who were formerly middle-class.”

“In a lot of ways, I had a wonderful childhood.”