When most people think of Woodrow Wilson, they see a dour minister's son who never cracked a smile, where in fact he was a man of genuine joy and great sadness.

There is always a certain leap of faith that editors have made with their nonfiction writers. If the trust is broken, things can get very embarrassing for the writers and the publisher.

By the '40s, Sam Goldwyn is a very serious man. By the '50s, he's the dean of American producers. To the end, he was Hollywood's gray eminence.

The successful editor is one who is constantly finding newwriters, nurturing their talents, and publishing them with critical and financial success.

I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.

I don't know of a soul who packed more living into 72 years than Charles Lindbergh did.

I am a compulsive worker. But I'm also a compulsive relaxer.

Clark Gable seemed fascinating all his life because there wasn't so much information about him. Today, you're on television all the time.

I read my first book on Woodrow Wilson at age 15, and I was hooked.

I'm so blessed to have such enlightened parents. It must have been very hard to watch their able-bodied son lock himself up in his old room for most of his 20s.

I like my subjects to be American, and not too dead, so I can interview people who knew them.

I am so tired. I have grown old from being serious. I have grown ill from being serious. I want to laugh at myself. I want to forget myself. I am so tired.

That is what all creatures great and small are made of. Leftover stardust. An atom exploded, and all the dust became the planets, the stars...and us. That's all anything amounts to.

Call me a troglodyte; I'd rather peruse those photos alongside my sweetheart, catch the newspaper on the way to work, and page thorough a real book.

In high school I was leafing through an anthology that our teachers had given up and I found a poem, I go, "That's so strange. This poem looks so much like my grandfather's poem."

Our plan is to struggle against terrorism and have security for the country and help draft a democratic constitution as soon as possible.

I don't mind making jokes, but I don't want to look like one...

I'mma just do me, when it feel right.

Just as science is more immediate and exciting than the history of science, so is insight more compelling than a history of insight.

To understand is not only to pardon, but in the end to love.

The sense of death is most in apprehension.