I always say your body is the temple of your spirit, why not decorate it? My kids say, no, no, your body is the temple of your spirit, keep it clean. I'm covered in tattoos and I get a tattoo every time I write a book. I get the tattoo from the book.

In terms of my own behavior and activity, the funny thing about regrets and saying "I'm sorry," is that there's so much I would do differently and want to do differently moving forward.

You can be disappointed but only if you thought [Barack Obama] was something that he said he wasn't!

Politicians are conservative by nature.

After I had known [Barack Obama] for a while, I remember saying to my partner, "You know, this guy is really ambitious, I think he wants to be Mayor of Chicago." That was the limit of my imagination.

I was terrible student at Michigan, terrible. Because there was too much else to do. I was learning form too many other sources to go to class.

I was a good liberal in some sense at that point. I wanted to end a war. I wanted to support the civil rights movement.