Memory is the fourth dimension to any landscape.

It's your flaws, not your strengths, that go down in the depths of your books. You're exposed, like dreaming you're naked in a public building.

L.A. is such a real, active place. My mother was very into the core of the city. She worked in politics, and you have to know your territory. It's an active matrix; we're all parts of it, but people don't often stop to wonder what's going on.

I despise places where you have to have an assigned seat. Makes me feel like I'm at the airport.

You know as well as I do that the family sitcom was the stalwart of TV for God knows how many decades.

As a medical doctor, I have known the face of adversity. I have seen much of death and dying, suffering and sorrow. I also remember the plight of students overwhelmed by their studies and of those striving to learn a foreign language. And I recall the fatigue and frustration felt by young parents with children in need.

The positivity of the Obamas as a family is undeniable.

Jeffersonian democracy, faulty as it is, and only the fragment of it that we have, is a thing of such preciousness, a thing of such value.