My father was a tomato farmer. There is the phrase that says he or she worked their fingers to the bone, well, that's my dad. And he was a very good man.

My mother was the most amazing person. She taught me to be kind to other women. She believed in family. She was with my father from the first day they met. All that I am, she taught me.

I want my great-granddaughter to have a fairly good understanding of the world in which I lived for 81 years and also the world before I came into it - all the way back a hundred thousand years, to the beginning of our species.

A good deed here, a good deed there, a good thought here, a good comment there, all added up to my career in one way or another.

There is not racial or ethnic domination of hopelessness. It's everywhere.

We all suffer from the preoccupation that there exists... in the loved one, perfection.

I'd seen my father. He was a poor man, and I watched him do astonishing things.