We live in a culture that encourages us to be big about ourselves, and I think the starting point of trying to build inner goodness is to be a little bit smaller about yourself.

I think the Republican budget priorities are messed up. I salute for the way they're attacking some of the entitlement programs, but they are taking huge cuts, by pretending they're just block-granting it to the states, out of Medicaid, from the least fortunate.

One of the things this world is finding is that emotion is the basis of reason. We really have to trust our emotions, which are much smarter than our reason in some ways.

I do think trying to live each day as a bunch of moral occasions, did I live up to what I would hope, and, if I didn't, what can I do tomorrow to be a little better, I do think we can improve. We get better at life as we get older.

The message of the summoned life is that you don't need to panic if you don't yet know what you want to do with your life. But you probably want to throw yourselves into circumstances where the summons will come.

Every White House I have covered since Reagan, when I got here, power has been more concentrated in the White House than the one before.

If you do something really cognitively demanding, like buying furniture, it turns out buying furniture is one of the most difficult things we do. Go into a furniture store and look at a sofa.