There's nothing like being a soldier for confidence or learning your limits or enduring utter humiliation.

Poetry and fiction have grieved for a century now over the loss of some vitality which they think they see in a past from which we are by now irrevocably alienated.

Fiction's essential activity is to imagine how others feel, what a Saturday afternoon in an Italian town in the 2nd Century looked like. My ambition is solely to get some effect, as of light on stone in a forest on a September day.

As long as you have ideas, you can keep going. That's why writing fiction is so much fun: because you're moving people about, and making settings for them to move in, so there's always something there to keep working on.

We can't bypass our heritage. We can't bypass the knowledge of who we are. You don't take a DNA test to see if you believe in freedom. Freedom is taught, and teaching the Constitution - I won't go on too much.

If you want to thrive in today's economy, you must challenge the status quo and get the financial education necessary to succeed.

A rational system and order for educational administration should be established on the principle of ensuring smooth progress of teaching and scientific research by teachers and researchers, and of edification of students.

I think that the American people are curious about who a candidate is, what their background is, who their family is, what their faith experience has been, their education, their work experience. All of those are factors that voters look at because they want to take a measure of the individual.