Listening to the stories my colleagues are researching and grappling with - in terms of access to documents, psychological understanding of their subjects, artful composition and determination to extrapolate from an individual's life lessons and insights that we can all learn from - I am each time overwhelmed by joy.

We've sweated and torn out our hair trying to reconstruct our chosen lives, to fashion them like literary sculptures, at once monumental and yet human. We've applied all of our intelligence, our empathy, our critical faculties, our compassion - and we think, in our delusion, that it's still 1960, and our work is going to get noticed.

At times, the reader of World War II literature must think every American, from general to G.I., kept a war diary, later mined for memoirs of the conflict. Few diaries, however, were published in their own right.

I am all for charity in judging the men who have occupied the Oval Office over the past seventy years, given the huge responsibilities the president carries across the world.

I think I'm one of the people who brought about peace in Ireland.

Music is the message of peace, and music only brings peace.

America's gravest moral evil, chattel slavery, was defeated by an authoritarian president in a religious civil war, not by proceduralism or constitutional debate.

There was a time in my life when I thought I had everything - millions of dollars, mansions, cars, nice clothes, beautiful women, and every other materialistic thing you can imagine. Now I struggle for peace.