Maybe we're kind of predisposed to think that anything a politician does is calculated and therefore suspect.

There is probably no such thing as a level playing field in political campaigns.

When Clinton first appeared on the national stage back in 1992, the young wife of the Arkansas governor running for president, she kept her natural-brown hair off her face with a headband.

When evidence emerged that Clinton was a devoted mother, Margaret Carlson writing in 'TIME' found her guilty of 'yuppie overdoting on her daughter.'

While the requirements of a good leader and a good man are similar, the requirements of a good leader and a good woman are mutually exclusive. A good leader must be tough, but a good woman must not be. A good woman must be self-deprecating, but a good leader must not be.

A sister is the one person you can call in the middle of the night when you can't sleep or the one who doesn't want to hear about your problems unless you're ready to do something about them. She's the one who is there when you need her or the one whose absence when you need her hurts the most.

Back when the powerful 19th-century senator Henry Clay was called 'the great compromiser,' achieving a compromise really was considered great.

The political Right is particularly vehement when it comes to compromise. Conservatives are now strongly swayed by the Tea Party movement, whose clarion call is a refusal to compromise regardless of the practical consequences.

If women talk in ways expected of them or project a feminine demeanor, it's seen as weak. But if they talk in ways associated with men or bosses, then they're seen as too aggressive. Whatever they do violates one or the other expectation: either you're not talking as you should as a woman or as boss.

Conflict can't be avoided in our public lives any more than we can avoid conflict with people we love. One of the great strengths of our society is that we can express these conflicts openly.

It is easy to understand why conflict is so often highlighted: Writers of headlines or promotional copy want to catch attention and attract an audience. They are usually under time pressure, which lures them to established, conventionalized ways of expressing ideas in the absence of leisure to think up entirely new ones.

One of the nice things about the United States is that, wherever you go, people speak the same language. So native New Yorkers can move to San Francisco, Houston, or Milwaukee and still understand and be understood by everyone they meet. Right? Well, not exactly. Or, as a native New Yorker might put it, 'Wrong!'

As a sociolinguist, I want to know how cultural differences affect the ways people talk and listen. My research method, inspired by the work of Robin Lakoff and John Gumperz of the University of California at Berkeley, is sociolinguistic microanalysis. I tape-record and transcribe naturally occurring conversations.

New Yorkers seem to think the best thing two people can do is talk.

Most non-New Yorkers, finding themselves within hearing range of strangers' conversation, think it's nice to pretend they didn't hear. But many New Yorkers think it's nice to toss in a relevant comment.

Much of my work over the years has developed the premise that women's styles of friendship and conversation aren't inherently better than men's, simply different.

I interviewed more than 100 women about their sisters, but if they also had brothers, I asked them to compare. Most said they talked to their sisters more often, at greater length and, yes, about more personal topics. This often meant that they felt closer to their sisters, but not always.

Sisters, to me, are fascinating because it is a unique connection of the coming together of connection and competition. The fact that you have these age differences is a built-in power struggle, and the fact that you're all trying to get attention and resources from the same parents creates competition.

I have two sisters; one is two years older, and one is eight years older. That helped me understand how completely different sister relationships can be.

I think it is important to remember that there are so many different ways to be sisters.

The trickiest thing about the double bind is that it operates imperceptibly, like shots from a gun with a silencer.

The double bind lowers its boom on women in positions of authority, so those who haven't yet risen to such positions have not yet felt its full weight.

If you talk to your friends the way your parents talk, they will think you are stiff and odd.

You gotta call it out first; it always has to be called out when we need social change, but this is how social change happens: you call it out. People had to call out child labor. People had to call out, 'Hey time's up; we need to vote. We live in this country.' People had to call out 'time's up' on enslaving people, you know.

You can't make movies without known names, and unknowns can't become known, because they can't get work.

We're always on the search for a novel or a source or an existing screenplay, or writing something ourselves that turns us on. But because films cost a lot of money to make and a huge amount of effort to get the people to rally, you have to really like it; you can't just semi-like it. Getting to 'really like' is the part that takes the minute.

The Oscars have always been an arena in which very commercial films are recognised, and I don't mean that in a bitter way; I just didn't ever look in that direction.

There's a period where you feel very hinky and low about yourself, like, 'That was a lot of time, and there's nothing to show for it.' I've tried to tell myself that if you're going to be a filmmaker, you can't really talk like that about time, because you'll hate yourself or feel very worthless.

Some people have these small, positive schemes for survival, a kind of strength that I am attracted to, maybe because I'm prone to the blues.

I'm always looking for instances of people doing things for and with each other for pleasure, for passion, for camaraderie, from kindness. It's the anthropology of people figuring how to punctuate life with the lyrical.

My ego is one thing. Of course I want people to like what I do. Of course. There's no doubt. You wouldn't do it. But I think what people don't fully know is how responsible you feel for so many entities. So many hardworking people who've collaborated.

People need meeting places. You need places where ideas get exchanged and you see each other's faces once in a while.

When I'm interested in an aspect of someone's life, I want to ask about their experiences, their survival strategies, and what they do to keep their lives interesting.

We need cultural awareness and a cooperative approach with other countries versus a dominating approach.

For whole swaths of people, that map of, 'Come along this way, come to college, do this and that,' isn't offered.

No one has a green light when they start a documentary - not ever.

I think one thing that's always a concern to me is you see a role, and you're not seeing the character; you're seeing so-and-so do it. Then I'm taken out of the story considerably, personally.

Festivals are where I see other peoples' films, where we talk, where I get to learn what was working about the film, I get to have a discussion with viewers... and people who enjoy reading films - I enjoy reading other peoples' films, and what discussions can come of that.

Time's up on cheesy, lesser, boring roles for females in the stories that we try to tell.

I like to make films about how people survive living in the United States.

You can't just pill away injuries that go deep in someone. They don't just stop those feelings from existing.

In documentary, mostly, people are going to say untoward things; people are going to have gnarly beliefs. People aren't perfect.

In documentary, you are sometimes burdened, or you feel very responsible for dealing with - I want to say - more complicated themes. Fiction allows for greater distillation.

I don't want to make fictional characters who are perfect - that's a vanilla situation - but the fact is you are allowed to more carefully select and curate what it is you're going to explore.

I have, obviously, a very complex relationship with the more industrial side of filmmaking and the machinery that can take an actor or an actress and create something so bamboozling and monumental and fathomless in terms of publicity hits.

Some of the subject matters that I like to make stories about are definitely not inherently commercial. So I have to look for a very special kind of financing and go down a very gentle path in order to make my films, as do basically all social-realist filmmakers. It's a long process.

I love to champion some of the hardworking actors where, it's been said to me, they don't bring money. But to me, they bring everything. They bring their wonderful selves.

I'm from the East Coast, and so therefore, the Pacific Northwest forest is very exotic land to me.

I find it so hard to make films about my own region, but it could happen.

My producing partner and I were shown a novel we really liked. It was called 'My Abandonment' by Peter Rock, and we enjoyed reading it.