Songwriting is the way of perpetual want. Songwriters are the blessed/cursed people. You will never have a moment's peace in your life. You will always be wanting the next song.

We have standards. Anybody with the kind of journalism experience and professionalism that you have displayed over these years can not work for my program.

Analysis of President Bush's tax plan has revealed that several elaborate tricks and gimmicks were used to make it look like a $1.35 trillion cut, but in reality it's going to be closer to costing $1.8 trillion. Critics claim it's math so fuzzy, you have to squint to see our nation's future of subsistence farming and post-apocalyptic roving motorcycle gangs.

[The conversation with John McCain] is not about being a pacifist or- suggesting that you can never have a military solution to things. It's just that, it appears that this is not the smart way to fight this threat.

You feel kind of weird cheering for chaos. There is that sense that the crazier it gets, the better off we are. Before, when I was part of the American public, I was hoping for a reasonable and quick solution to the impeachment process. Now, I'm hoping for partisan bedlam and chaos. It's really what serves me best.

What good are images if people understand them?

I'm also interviewing a guy who's just written a book about his experience living in Iraq, faced with the type of violence as he said, an unimaginable scale. And I think that the combination of that is very hard to shake.