Being an American is a state of mind, and to be in a family is to feel the power of belonging, the power of your roots. Family is a tree, the strength of a tree, the roots, the leaves, the past and the present, the future, the fruits, the seeds.

I love being irreverent. But I hate being irrelevant. I love being irreverent because at the end of the day your actions belie your intentions.

I'll never lose the sense of being an underdog.

I see myself being a father, hopefully a husband, but I'm very gun-shy. The older I get, the further the goalpost.

The romantic idea of the penniless writer is false. It's terrible. I hated being in debt. I hated the anxiety of not knowing whether we could pay our rent that month. Thankfully, I had a wife who was very supportive and had faith and shared my madness.

Fasting is, first and foremost, an exercise for identifying and managing adversity in all its forms. With faith, in full conscience, fasting calls women and men to an extra degree of self-awareness.

It is God's planet - and he's taking care of it. And I don't believe that anything we do will raise or lower the temperature one point.

Aircraft do not crash of themselves. They come to grief because men are foolish, or vain, or lazy, or irresolute or reckless. One crash in a thousand may be unavoidable because God wills it so - not more than that.