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When we stop fighting against death, we are able to wake up to our lives.

This Congress has promised all manner of border security and port security to the tune of billions of dollars... yet we have - to date - funded our promises for port security at only $900 million. That's quite a distance between what we say and what we actually do.

People in my world can be disdainful of political and social problems and solutions. But we're never going to stop needing those.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.

I always go back to Harry Truman: Should we drop an atomic bomb to save 100,000 lives? That's a hell of a decision to make. Did he make that decision by himself? No, he had advisers.

The first requisite of a good citizen in this republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his own weight.

Just because I'm not forever by your side doesn't mean that's not precisely where I want to be.

From a young age, I was rubbing elbows with a very different kind of person and social class, and I felt a lot of tension and conflict in my identity because of that.

I've never read it because I'd like to see one Shakespeare play that I don't know what happens. I close my ears and hum whenever I hear anything about 'Pericles, Prince of Tyre.'

Conservatives, who have presumed that the key to preventing AIDS is abstinence-only education, and liberals, who have focused on distribution of condoms, should both note that the intervention that has tested most cost-effective in Africa is neither... Secular bleeding hearts and religious bleeding hearts will have to forge a common cause.

The simple life on the farm was everything to me. Nothing was more relaxing after a long plane flight than to reach the winding driveway that led up to my house. The quiet of the night was more soothing than a sleeping pill.

The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.

To complain that life has no joys while there is a single creature whom we can relieve by our bounty, assist by our counsels or enliven by our presence, is... just as rational as to die of thirst with the cup in our hands.

It is time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a sea of unremarkable men and women, anonymous faces on the street, a hundred thousand unalphabetized things, a million forgotten hours.

From books, I winnowed the glue that held together my psyche as it struggled to stay whole. It was from stories and myths that I learned to dream, to imagine a different life, to realize potentials and probabilities other than those of the painful, poverty-mired existence I found myself in as a child. With a book I could hide in a corner, safe from the heavy hand and belt of my stepfather, and for a while not worry about where our next meal would come from, or where we would be sleeping that night, or when my mother would break and have to be sent yet again to the mental institution. Books, for me, we tiny life rafts that I clung to desperately.

People don't realize what a brilliant politician Lincoln was. Looking back, we want to ascribe a level of providence to his every decision but he was a cunning and calculating politician; from the cultivation of his image as a hayseed from Illinois, to his ability to keep this country together under dire circumstances.

My mother wasn't strong like my aunt. She was just very passive.

I have often wondered why I was never captain of the Lakers.

I actually collect old First and Second World War memorabilia.

We're all entitled to make mistakes. I'm not one of these guys where if you make a mistake, I'm gonna try to tear your life down and burn it to the ground.