I'd like to see a revival of state legislatures, in which I am a true Jeffersonian.

I do not much care for nature, and believe that flowers belong in vases rather than loose and untidy on the ground.

I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.

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

I am an obsessive rewriter, doing one draft and then another and another, usually five. In a way, I have nothing to say, but a great deal to add.

Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.

I do not admire 'the people,' as such. No one really does. Their folk wisdom is usually false, their instincts predatory. Even their sense of survival - so highly developed in the individual - goes berserk in the mass. A crowd is a fool.