If you're a Kennedy and you go to Italy or you go to Argentina, you're treated as royalty. And in the United States, we're endlessly fascinated by the family.

Politicians wanted to mine the Grand Canyon for zinc and copper, and Theodore Roosevelt said no.

I learned more about history and literature in the used bookstores in DC than in college libraries.

Hurricane Katrina is without question the worst natural disaster in American history.

John Kerry wants to be the hero in his own drama. He likes King Arthur and the Round Table. He likes the young swashbuckling Churchill, and he loved the early antics of Theodore Roosevelt.

I think Ronald Reagan is what happened....The age of Reagan brought conservatism into the mainstream....It also brought us the beginning of the new media-talk radio, the internet, cable television.

I have a lot of books I want to write.

Over the past four decades no reporter has critiqued the American South with such evocative sensitivity and bedrock honesty as Curtis Wilkie.

Animals interest me more than anything else.

I feel like I'm always learning from people.

Demeanor-wise, Reagan was a conservative, but a pragmatic conservative, and he found silver linings in things. He liked to be a mediator. He didn't like to have enemies around him.

Take away the Book of Mormon and the revelations, and where is our religion? We have none.

It's how you look at beauty. Is it only an outward appearance with hair and makeup and a hot body, or is it something deeper than that?

I think everybody has ups and downs in their lives. We learn from the biggest disappointments, right? You learn how to be humble to yourself and to be humble to others.

I have a conflicted relationship with musicals, because I think the music itself can be so horrendous. It's an industry that relies on appealing to a mainstream culture in order to survive.

Mine is a jealous heart, imagines things that never are.

Man has done a lot to make himself dangerous and animals get the worst of all of it. But then, man too is an animal.

Never by reflection, but only by doing is self- knowledge possible to one.

I'd see movies, comedies, and I loved 'Animal House', I loved all the John Hughes stuff, but I never saw me and my friends totally represented.

I'm always kind of hoping that I'll get a movie that shoots in Alabama so I can go back and kind of get a break from my city life.

When I'm not working on the ground, spending time with my husband and daughter puts me at ease.