I think confidence comes from doing something well, working at it hard, and you build it up. It's not something you're born with. You have to build the confidence as you go along.

Excitement about things became a habit, a part of my personality, and the expectation that I should enjoy new experiences often engendered the enjoyment itself.

An adult friend of Lincoln's: "Life was to him a school.

I liked the thought that the book I was now holding had been held by dozens of others.

Where's the progress that we're going to see in Afghanistan? You have to keep public support both on the economy and the war or these things will really become troubling.

I've chosen to be a commentator and an analyzer of politics, rather than an actual doer of it. I think it could have gone the other way, but I'm not sorry that it didn't, because this made it easier to be home with my kids and to spend time with them. Writing you can do right in your house. You don't have to go anywhere.

Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country - bigger than all the Presidents together.