People want to psychoanalyze me, but the fact is, I'm not that complicated. I'm pretty straightforward. And I'm not all that self-reflective, because I tend to be a doer.

It was really wonderful playing with Aretha [ Franklin]. I knew that she knew what she was doing, so all I had to do was sit in the background and vamp a little bit.

We've organized human potential and have been better at using human potential better than any country on the face of the Earth. That's because we've recognized that our national creed, our national identity, is that it doesn't matter where you're from, it matters where you're going. You can come from hard circumstances and do great things. We've got to make that true for a whole variety of people who no longer feel that.

Well, I didn't feel that I could do justice to this story of my parents and their generation, and all that they did to make it possible for me to be who I am, if I sort of just put it at the beginning of a book about my last eight years in foreign policy.

The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly Saddam can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

What surprised me was the angst at our democracy. And I understand it - I teach at a university and feel it in my students - but what I've tried to say to people is that we have amazing institutions, but nobody ever said we were perfect. We struggled before and we're struggling now, and we're going to struggle every day. We're a work in progress. That's why the American experience is so important for us to remember, and for us to be a beacon for others to enjoy those same rights.

What you know today can affect what you do tomorrow, but not what you did yesterday.