Confidence is the immaterial residue of material actions. Confidence is the public face of competence.

If you write something that gets a bad response, or someone commits candor or is off message, there are often consequences almost immediately when it appears in the paper or a magazine, that somebody gets called into the boss's office. And sometimes it can result in a loss of access for the reporter.

It's exciting to work with the kids so devoid of irony, so unguarded. And also terrifying

I don't have to deal with the issues of the daily news cycle.

Reaching out to any fellow ghetto kids is an act he puts in the same category as doing drugs: the initial rush of warmth and euphoria puts you on a path to ruin.

Two sons, they'll both be presidents after they win their Nobel Prizes. And the daughters, they'll be prima ballerinas before they become the president of Princeton and start their Internet company. And I just started to think about What's the conventional load of those expectations you carry around? You have to pull them out one by one and smash them in the corner. You realize the pile is quite high. But in a way, it becomes oddly liberating to do that.

[Barack Obama] says that he thinks America felt better, more confident, because Washington was not simply in a gridlock, in stasis, where nothing was being done. And he talks about that as a positive.