There was a time that human rights was not even an issue in this country. Then prisoners' rights became an issue.
What I have experienced is nothing compared to what political prisoners in prisons suffer.
I think I was the healthiest prisoner of conscience in the world.
I am an adamant feminist. It never occurred to me to take my husband's name when we married. I am a supporter of abortion rights, of equal pay for equal work, of the rights of women prisoners, of all the time-honored feminist causes, and then some.
Among those people lucky enough, if you will, to have actually been brought to trial as a political prisoner, several historians have said there has not been one acquittal since the Bolshevik Revolution.
Only a free West can help the prisoners of today's left- and right-wing dictatorships.
When I wrote my eighth thriller, 'Inside Out,' in 2009, the villains were a group of CIA and other government officials who colluded to destroy a series of tapes depicting Americans torturing war-on-terror prisoners.
I view my pitching on how confident I was out there, period. And if I lose that confidence, I can become a prisoner of my own mind.
To be a prisoner means to be defined as a member of a group for whom the rules of what can be done to you, of what is seen as abuse of you, are reduced as part of the definition of your status.
Half of the days in 2014, I had to confine my daughter to my home like a prisoner because the air quality in Beijing was so poor. One morning, I saw my daughter banging on the window... The day will come when she asks me, 'Why do you keep me here? What is going to hurt me when I go outside?'
