And, finally, Lincoln was not a good impromptu speaker; he was at his best when he could read from a carefully prepared manuscript. Though maybe a teleprompter could have helped that!

What I thought we ought to try to do in a book like this is to focus closely on Lincoln, himself, to see what he knew, how he knew it, how he came to make the decisions that he did, and how he implemented them.

I love mysteries, and I read them every night before I go to bed.

But having said all of that, that still doesn't account for a lot of the increase in popularity which stems, I think, from Lincoln's personal characteristics.

The more I have studied Lincoln, the more I have followed his thought processes, the more I am convinced that he understood leadership better than any other American president.

Maybe I will write a memoir, perhaps I'll do some essays, or maybe I will write a mystery story.

At the beginning, Lincoln was so inexperienced he had reverence for military expertise, not realizing that there wasn't any military expertise, that the most anybody had commanded up to that point had been somebody, some troops in the Mexican War, and it had been years ago.

And, finally, Lincoln was not a good impromptu speaker; he was at his best when he could read from a carefully prepared manuscript. Though maybe a teleprompter could have helped that!

In Lincoln's day a President's religion was a very private affair. There were no public prayer meetings, no attempts to woo the Religious Right. Few of Lincoln's countrymen knew anything at all of his religious beliefs.

The big biography of Lincoln necessarily had to do so much with his political career, his ambitions, his accomplishments in public, with less time to spend on his private life, his inner life, and I thought this might be a way of getting at that.

I'm not sure Lincoln would fare well if he were a presidential candidate today.

If you think about it, the historian's task is like that of the detective.

I was able to sit at Lincoln's side and see how he thought and how he acted, and how he felt about what was going on around him. I felt the pressures that were on him. You can see what people were writing to him, how they were nudging him.

But I have tried to go over it very carefully, not merely what the evidence is, but with psychoanalysts and psychologists, and I think we're just about all agreed that Lincoln and Speed did not have a homosexual relationship.

I think, with the gay liberation movement has had need for heroes and heroines, and it would be rather nice to have Abraham Lincoln as your poster boy, wouldn't it?

Well, it seems to me Lincoln, I suppose, is kind of a model of a particular sort of presidency, a presidency that first of all is elected by a minority of the votes.

Lincoln had no such person that he could talk with. Often, as a result, he debated with himself, and he would draw up a kind of list of the pros and cons of an argument, and carefully figure them out, and he might test them in public.

It goes back to all of us wanting to be in Hollywood. We're all dying to win an Oscar.

Going on with life, it only gets more and more intense as time goes by - and the challenges only multiply.

Getting ahead cannot be the only motive that motivates people. You have to imagine what a good life is.

If you want to write for T.V. and movies, you will be subjected to kind and unkind criticism. You had better get used to it and develop a shell.

My ma is an economist. My dad is a software engineer.

I think people who lack humility are really annoying.

I've lived a fast-paced life, but I had the best childhood. I didn't miss out on anything by having my daughter at a young age.

I'm convinced that quite a lot of young people, when they get in trouble with the law, it's a cry for help there. Because it's not that they go out to offend. It's that their behaviour is self-parading, it's the big 'I'. And sometimes that means they're really lacking in confidence.

If the first lady is concerned about this Internet cycle, what would she have done during the heyday when there was 12, 13 editions of a paper in one day? What would she have done with that news cycle?

I am very excited to be able to work more with young designers and support them.

I just felt from personal observation that there is nothing more dislocated or alienated than a lifelong military person trying to cope in civilian life. It's like two completely separate planets.

As a child, I was fortunate enough to be close to family members who were - and still are - great storytellers. I was a gullible country boy from Rocky Mount, Virginia, and I believed every folktale they told me, no matter how fantastic.

I have this cozy house here and I get three pensions from the States. I've done nicely.

The last time I heard real screaming in the theatre was when I went to see a movie I did years ago, called 'Wait Until Dark.' Now, my mother was the least emotional person on the planet, but when I got killed in the movie, she stood up and screamed, 'That's my son!' At Radio City Music Hall in New York!

There are some kinds of Christianity that insist you have to believe literally in doctrine. The Gnostic gospels open out the complexity and multiplicity of approaches to this. If you think the story of the virgin birth is mistranslated for instance it doesnt mean you have to throw out the whole thing.

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don't have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.

I saw people, and I can't name them of course, that maybe were skeptical at first that were really sold on Donald Trump.

I was a super tomboy growing up.

When I would see my friends with their kids, I was envious that you can use children to get out of just about anything. If you don't feel like going to a dinner party, you could say, 'My kid's sick. I can't make it.' Who's gonna argue with you?

We have to understand in value what the services of nature are so that we can understand that degrading them is an irreplaceable resource that no amount of money or human ingenuity can replace.

Playing Marcia was a double-edged sword; it always will be whenever you play a character like that. You will be known as that character forever.

There is something that is much more scarce, something finer far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability.

In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.

Everybody has gone through something that has changed them in a way that they could never go back to the person they once were.