Destroyers did not have chaplains because they were too small.

I was standing on the deck of the USS Blue, a destroyer. We were all alone out there at this buoy, tied up.

I was 20 years old at Pearl Harbor. I was in the Navy about a year and four months before the war.

Everything was black in the harbor, but there were still some fires burning on the ships.

We were very fortunate that the carriers weren't in the harbor.

Destroyers did not have chaplains because they were too small.

All we had aboard the ship that morning was one Annapolis graduate and three reserves.

I'd get a shell, they weighed about 80 pounds I think, but when I was 19 or 20 that was nothing. I'd take a shell and a bag of powder, I'd put it in the hoist and then I would send it up to the gun.

After the atomic bombs were dropped, the war ended and we went into Tokyo Bay with the rest of the fleet, the Missouri and the rest of them, while they signed the terms of surrender that ended the war.

They got word that the Japanese planes were coming back, so we sunk her ourselves so the Japanese wouldn't get it. We didn't want the Japanese to get it intact.

Our duty was to try and find the Japanese fleet. We never did find the Japanese fleet and I am awfully glad, because they had attacked us there with six carriers, three battleships, 10 or 15 cruisers, and about 20 destroyers.

I had been out there long enough. I had not seen my family for four years.

We managed to get underway, and I don't know to this day why we didn't get struck or take a torpedo, but we didn't. We got outside of the exit of the harbor and we started dropping depth charges.

It was lucky for me. It wasn't lucky for the nine people that got killed and the 20 that were injured.

We got orders to strike the Marshall and Gilbert Islands. We had a task force with the Enterprise. We had two or three cruisers and probably eight or 10 destroyers.

The gunner's mate came up and started breaking the locks on the ammunition. Everything was locked up for fear that someone might go in there with a cigarette or something.

Relax in the precious arms of the Holy Spirit.

I wasn't really conscious about 'The 39 Clues' movie when I wrote 'The Black Circle.'

Congratulations I knew that if someone could do it then it must be you. Well done my friend

You know, actually, I went to Yale because I wanted to stay out of the army.

'Elf' has become this big holiday movie, and I remember running around the streets of New York in tights saying, 'This could be the last movie I ever make,' and I could never have predicted that it'd become such a popular film.

A good romantic comedy is my favorite movie to watch.

You can't keep a democracy going in a functional and constructive way if only 10 percent of the people you represent think your institution is functioning in an acceptable way. That's just not viable.

Republicans have never been good at public relations.

I'd like to work with the missus, but there's nothing in the pipeline at the moment.

There is one unity, unified wholeness, total natural law, in the transcendental unified consciousness.

I talked about adopting a baby when I was 20 years old, before it became 'hip.'

I just love being in front of the camera making people laugh, cry, entertaining them. It's the 'nasha' of performance that I enjoy. It's my calling, and I'm blessed to be able to do that for a living.

If you have a line of business - I know this as a CEO - or if you have a teenager - I know this as a parent - who have a spending problem, what do you do? You quit giving them money.

You can't pay for healthcare if we're sending a trillion dollars a year to dictators.

It's very, very corrupting to the spirit, doing comedy. And you have to be almost a saint, like Jack Benny was, like Steve Martin is, to avoid the corrupting of it, because there's very little work where the actual work and the reward are simultaneous, and comedy is that.

Poverty is not just about income: it's about aspiration. It's not just about giving people a couple of extra pounds a week, welcome though that is.

The enemy resembles us. Therefore, he needs to be approached not as an assembly of 'targets' to be destroyed one by one; but as a living, intelligent entity capable of acting and reacting.

My policy in America is, 'Steady growth is forever.'

I was very fascinated by the time when firearms went from being fire sticks to being something people could use to hunt and to survive.

Fiction connects: past and present; the great and the small; the surface with the depths. Fiction brings out the innermost, invisible springs of life that cannot be revealed in factual narratives.

I worked for Xerox for 4 years and after that I knew I was never going to be a corporate person. It wasn't my environment.

I know there will be X amount of women being diagnosed. I love to say, You can get through it. You can.

Please stop teaching my children that everyone gets a trophy just for participating. What is this, the Nobel Prize? Not everybody gets a trophy.

Italians know about human nature - they understand human nature perhaps better than anyone else does. They know that people are weak and greedy and lazy and dishonest and they just try to make the best of it; to work around it.