It's better to be black than gay because when you're black you don't have to tell your mother.

In order to get big things done, sometimes, presidents have to be deft at moving the pea around under the shells.

Ronald Reagan was a dim hack who did horrible damage to almost everything he touched.

There is a lot in American politics (and in American life) that is angry, greedy, reckless and violent.

Optimism....is neither weak nor naive. It can be tough and pure and earned just as clearly as any brooding existential despair.

As a writer, I have to admit, there is something darkly compelling about Alzheimer's because it attacks the two things most central to a writer's craft - language and memory, which together make up an individual's identity. Alzheimer's makes a new character out of a familiar person.

For all the huffing and blowing we get about rugged individualism, the American spirit and the American experiment always have had at their heart the notion that the government is all of us and that, therefore, the government may keep things in trust for all of us.