The American idea is as promising, imaginative, and full of the unexpected as the land itself. The land represents freedom - the frontier, the ability to make a new future with your own bare hands.

What you are will show, ultimately. Start now, every day, becoming, in your actions, your regular actions, what you would like to become in the bigger scheme of things.

I'm interested when things are upside down - because there are so many possibilities in that one moment. There is a lot that is exposed.

Identity is an assemblage of constellations.

We spend so much time bantering about the words when the real open conversations might very well be our actions. I worry about our rhetoric.

You can't teach talent. You can't teach inspiration. You can teach people critical facilities. You can give them techniques. You can teach discipline. And you can teach them about the business.

Each person has a literature inside them.

Hope is when you look out the window and you go, 'It doesn't look good at all, but I'm going to go beyond what I see to give people visions of what could be.'

Friendship is a wildly underrated medication.

Be more than ready. Be present in your discipline. Remember your gift. Be grateful for your gift and treat it like a gift. Cherish it, take care of it, and pass it on.

You've heard that old expression from Shakespeare, 'Just speak the speech'? The words themselves will take you to the reality of the character. And so this led me to interview people.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

Life is not just one dark moment after another.

There's no credit buying on eternal things, none at all. Anything that is worthwhile has to be paid for in advance.

My next project will be a Christian album, another one. I wrote the songs for the ones you're referring to, but I want to do some of my old gospel favorites. That's what my next album's going to be.

The one of us who lies the best will get the better of the bargain. It's a game. A very exciting game that's played all over the world. Good players got rich, and bad players don't.

When I served as US Ambassador to NATO in the 1970s, the center of gravity in Europe was France and Germany.

A Church that has lost its voice for justice is a Church that has lost its relevance in the world.

Words were medicine; they were magic and invisible. They came from nothing into sound and meaning. They were beyond price; they could neither be bought nor sold.

Over the past six years, my girlfriend and I live on our boat two or three months a year. It's just one of our seasonal homes at this point.

As long as the team is pulling together, I’m happy to be a part of it.