I've had menial jobs, and 'professional writer' isn't one of them.

What makes writing a memoir difficult is harder to quantify. Is it learning to know when you're ready to talk about something? Is it seeing the structure in a lumpen mass of fact? Is it finding out what you were really like as other people saw you? Yes to each.

In each scene, the writer sets up a situation, which brings a conflict as well as either a small victory or a loss at the close of that particular scene.

Memoirs are - memory is - rarely 100 percent accurate. Any autobiography is a construct, ballpark, even unnatural. Private diaries, too, can be unreliable - a detail that matters only if the diary is read.

All space projects push the frontiers of technology and are drivers of innovation.

We had many good directors - John Carpenter, Brian De Palma - but things have become polluted by business, money and bad relationships. The success of the horror genre has led to its downfall.

While there have been terrific advances in the state of technology around heuristics, behavior blocking, and things like that, technology is only a part of the approach to solving the problem with the more important aspect involving putting the right process in place.

It is the policy of the federal government to use all resources at its disposal to make our financial system stronger.