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

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.

There were a lot of adventure books for boys, historical novels by Kenneth Roberts, and whatever mystery novels the alarmed librarian imagined might not corrupt an eager but innocent youth.

Having soon discovered to be great, I must appear so, and therefore studiously avoided mixing in society, and wrapped myself in mystery, devoting my time to fasting and prayer.

It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away.

The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.

Sir, you have tasted two whole worms; you have hissed all my mystery lectures and been caught fighting a liar in the quad; you will leave by the next town drain.

Everything I write comes from my childhood in one way or another. I am forever drawing on the sense of mystery and wonder and possibility that pervaded that time of my life.

The only mystery in life is why the kamikaze pilots wore helmets.

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

I think that the ideal space must contain elements of magic, serenity, sorcery and mystery.

It is the mystery of the creative act that something other than our conscious self takes over.

The mystery is what prompted men to leave caves, to come out of the womb of nature.

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.

Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is God's gift, that's why we call it the present.

Religion points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage.

Ballet is sort of a mystery to me. And I don't want to unravel that mystery.

I thought I had a clear picture of death, but now I know it's a mystery and it will always be a mystery, although it is something we all have in common: everybody knows that life ends with death.

It is a great mystery that though the human heart longs for Truth, in which alone it finds liberation and delight, the first reaction of human beings to Truth is one of hostility and fear!

It is not as though the process of production holds any mystery for me, I know exactly what it involves and I know the predominant concern in shooting one of those things is production values - or as they would say, seeing it all up there on screen.

The great mystery to me is how restaurant critics think they can get away with doing their job without anybody noticing who they are.

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

Every branch of human knowledge, if traced up to its source and final principles, vanishes into mystery.

It may interest you to know that my breakup with Terry and this mystery did not happen concurrently in real life. That is a writer's device, which places Gabriel under even greater pressure when the mystery begins to reveal itself.

The first step towards vice is to shroud innocent actions in mystery, and whoever likes to conceal something sooner or later has reason to conceal it.

That was the crossover line for us, to be able to play that many shows, sell them out real quick and have that tribe queue up outside and still be a mystery to everybody else.

Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge.

For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.

To us sin has not become any less of a mystery or a pain.

There is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath.

It would certainly be interesting to know what the CIA knew about Oswald six weeks before the assassination, but the contents of this particular message never reached the Warren Commission and remain a complete mystery.

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

Time is still the great mystery to us. It is no more than a concept; we don't know if it even exists.

I am searching for abstract ways of expressing reality, abstract forms that will enlighten my own mystery.