When you read with your child, you show them that reading is important, but you also show them they're important - that they are so important to you that you will spend 20 minutes a day with your arm around them.

Don't start smoking. It's much harder to stop than it is not to start at all.

There's nothing political about American literature.

As long as we have books, we are not alone.

If you take the burden of health care, of diseases off the backs of some other countries, it gives them a chance to use their own very limited resources in ways that help their people. And also there's a hopelessness associated with deadly diseases, that if that can be alleviated, people can build their own economies in their own countries and they'll be less reliant on the developed world for help.

You know, there are a lot of would-be governors of Texas sitting around today who never took the opportunity to get into a race when the time was right. If George is good at anything, it's timing.

I think doctors have really come up to speed and understand that more women than men die of heart disease. [But] all the research on heart disease has really been based on men, and needs to be updated with research on women - even very early-stage research is done using male rats!