My parents are aging and there are difficult issues. It's strange to have children at the beginning of life and parents nearing the end.

[s]he was a compulsive pessimist, always looking for the soft brown spot in the fruit, pressing so hard she created it.

In life, redemption was walking up the down escalator: stop to congratulate yourself, and back you slid.

Religious speech is extreme, emotional, and motivational. It is anti-literal, relying on metaphor, allusion, and other rhetorical devices, and it assumes knowledge within a community of believers.

Perhaps this was the secret to being at peace: want nothing but what is given to you.

Jealousy clings to love's underside like bats to a bridge.

Sorrow can be a bully.

The September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon prompted a fundamental shift in the American government's approach to Islamic terrorism.

There were in life rarely, if ever, "right" decisions, never perfect ones, only the best to be made under the circumstances.

Nothing in life gets dropped without someone else having to pick it up.

Fabricating reality was criminal; editing it, commonplace.

By focusing your thoughts on the things you are thankful for, you attract more things to be grateful for into your life.

If you're afraid of heights, lean over a railing. If you're afraid of germs, lick a floor. But what do you do if your greatest fear is of being afraid?

So the better my partner or my opposition, however you like to think about it, the better my game.

I don't need to speak...I play the guitar!

Let the ancient serve the present, let the foreign serve the national; by developing that which has been accomplished one creates something that is new.

For Ryan's Daughter I used a total of eight harps, something that was, at least, weird.

Every time I stepped into the ring, somebody wanted to kill me.

Those who skim over the surface in a hit-or-miss fashion not only forfeit the best returns on their efforts, but are ever barred from the keen pleasure of seeing beauty in the results of their labor.

Most people I work with are older than me and the main thing I've learnt is that everyone is a dumb as an 18-year-old.

I've got about 27 gigs right now. I've got radio, I've got television, I've got The Washington Post.