The successful editor is one who is constantly finding newwriters, nurturing their talents, and publishing them with critical and financial success.

There is always a certain leap of faith that editors have made with their nonfiction writers. If the trust is broken, things can get very embarrassing for the writers and the publisher.

By the '40s, Sam Goldwyn is a very serious man. By the '50s, he's the dean of American producers. To the end, he was Hollywood's gray eminence.

When most people think of Woodrow Wilson, they see a dour minister's son who never cracked a smile, where in fact he was a man of genuine joy and great sadness.

I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.

I don't know of a soul who packed more living into 72 years than Charles Lindbergh did.

I am a compulsive worker. But I'm also a compulsive relaxer.

Clark Gable seemed fascinating all his life because there wasn't so much information about him. Today, you're on television all the time.

I read my first book on Woodrow Wilson at age 15, and I was hooked.

I'm so blessed to have such enlightened parents. It must have been very hard to watch their able-bodied son lock himself up in his old room for most of his 20s.

I like my subjects to be American, and not too dead, so I can interview people who knew them.

Most people do not understand the process of achieving and fulfilling a dream

The historian, like everyone else, is forever trapped in the egocentric predicament, and 'presentism' is his original sin.

Tackle issues not people. Am I trying to prove my point or improve the relationship?

To say that obesity is caused by merely consuming too many calories is like saying that the only cause of the American Revolution was the Boston Tea Party.

Scriptures are Letters from Home. Can you imagine getting a letter from home and not even bothering to open it?

The wind is rushing after us, and the clouds are flying after us, and the moon is plunging after us, and the whole wild night is in pursuit of us; but, so far we are pursued by nothing else.

I was swinging like a toilet door on a prawn trawler.

Right, left, Greens, Baathists, whatever: it comes down to grabbing and holding power and using ideology - or religion, race - as a justification.

Electoral contests have nothing but polls, which is why people have grown so obsessed with them; we're desperate for an objective rendering of what is happening and what may happen.

I will tell you the secret. God has had all there was of me.