All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.

My family helped start [this country], we've been in political life ... since the 1690s, and I have a very possessive sense about this country.

I'm in Hollywood right now, surrounded by nothing but the sons and grandsons of movie stars.

When Ronald Reagan's career in show business came to an end, he was hired to impersonate, first, a California governor and then an American president who would reduce taxes for his employers, the Southern and Western New Rich, much of whose money came from the defence industries. There is nothing unusual about this arrangement. All recent presidents have had their price-tags.

What other culture could have produced someone like Hemmingway and not seen the joke?

There is hardly an American male of my generation who has not at one time or another tried to master the victory cry of the great ape as it issued from the androgynous chest of Johnny Weissmuller, to the accompaniment of thousands of arms and legs snapping during attempts to swing from tree to tree in the backyards of the Republic.

All I want is that Americans still be able to read the alphabet in a hundred years. I am not very ambitious.