We all believe that we are a certain kind of person, but we never know until we do something that proves otherwise, or until we die.

There are two ways to look at life. The first view is that nothing stays the same and that nothing is inherently connected, and that the only driving force in anyone's life is entropy. The second is that everything pretty much stays the same (more or less) and that everything is completely connected, even if we don't realize it.

I was fortunate that I was at newspapers for eight years, where I wrote at least five or six stories every week. You get used to interviewing lots of different people about a lot of different things. And they aren't things you know about until you do the story.

I'm really an alarmist when it comes to epidemics. Swine flu now; when SARS was big, I was all freaked out about that, bird flu. That terrifies me.

But no matter how many times we re-rank the presidents, in another 200 years, the top presidents will still be Washington and Lincoln and Jefferson, because they defined what a president is. They are the idea, and you can't be better than the idea.

Because I'm 44, I feel kind of lucky that I lived through this period where I started my career where there was no Internet at all, and now when I finish it, there will be nothing but the Internet.

Let's face it: Sadness and evil are always more believable than happiness and love. When a movie reviewer calls a film "realistic," everyone knows what that means--it means the movie has an unhappy ending.