Ive summarized dozens of books in my literary career; its become rather second nature.

In American religious history, theological qualms tend to get pushed aside when politics intervenes.

In politics, if you're explaining, you're loosing.

It takes two things to make a political lie work: a powerful person or institution willing to utter it, and another set of powerful institutions to amplify it.

Only liberals know how to make you freer on the job, which is where most of us suffer the gravest indignities in our lives.

I cant summarize my favorite movie, Jacques Tatis Play Time. You just have to see it.

No historical analogies are exactly precise.

When legitimately constituted state authority stands down in the face of armed threats, the very foundation of the republic is in danger.

College was at the heart of his sentimental imagination.

Stories are "how we organize the chaos of experience into the order we require just a carry-on." Joan Gideon

Presidents are also always storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies.

May your soul be rooted in love.

I want to question my belief, so that what is left after I have questioned it, will be even stronger.

Bring the past, but only if you can build from it.

Great content inspires action.

Reunions are always fraught with awkward tensions - the necessity to account for oneself; the attempt to find, through memories, an ember of the old emotions.

I woke up one morning with this song in my head, and the opening line of the song: My name was Richard Nixon, only now I'm a girl.

Old age is never honored among us, but only indulged, as childhood is; and old men lose one of the most precious rights of man,--that of being judged by their peers.

Clearly the most unfortunate people are those who must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhaps twenty to the minute. They deserve the shortest hours and the highest pay.

We never look beyond our assumptions and what's worse, we have given up trying to meet others; we just meet ourselves.

One can never expect critics to behave in any predictable way.