I have not been briefed.

They're the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and they will not do that. They will not pull the trigger.

We're going to march on Washington with a host of Republicans, Democrats, business leaders, legislators.

Here is my general approach to the energy companies. You have already charged the utilities a 50 percent credit penalty for the power they were buying from you. You're charging us a penalty. You're not going to get two bites of the apple here.

Now, in the space of a year, we've spent 450 percent more for power than we did the year before, and bought essentially the same amount of power. This year, that number's likely to go up. That can't go on forever and have us continue to be the economic engine for America.

I don't know if I would do this if I had to start over again.

Duke came to us. They volunteered to come to us and made a number of suggestions to some people on my staff. I don't know how I would characterize them, but there have been some discussions going back and forth between Duke and members of my staff.

We're not going to take this sitting down. We are fighting back.

We started focusing on this in earnest late summer and early fall. I can build more power plants. In the 12 years before us, not a single plant of major consequence was built.

So it was flawed in that it didn't require California to have a first claim on the power plants. It deregulated part of the market, but not all of the market.

I'm doing my part, building plants at a record rate, having historic conservation levels. The only people not doing their part is the federal government that is siding with the energy companies against the interests of the people of California.

Meanwhile, people have to join us and fight back against the federal government that has dropped the ball, that is in bed with these energy companies, that wants them to make more money than they've made before.

There are so many scenarios here. We tried to prepare for the worst summer in 40 years and build assumptions based on that. We're preparing for the worst, but we're hoping for the best. And I've told people the end is in sight.

Why? Because we're very well down this process as it is - flawed as it is - and we're counting on getting more power plants on line by the end of 2003 so we have a surplus of power.

We believe you will not have to pay more than the current rate structure proposes - which is, for 50 percent of the public, nothing; for another 25 percent, only a 10 percent increase; and for the remaining 25 percent, a 34 percent increase.

There's no question that California, in the last three or four years, has been privileged to add disproportionately to the economic growth of America, and to contribute to its technological productivity.

Well, there's no question that the law passed in 1996 was flawed. It deregulated the wholesale market, meaning the price that the utilities had to pay energy companies for power, but not the retail market.

I have not been briefed.

As the governor of this state, I obviously see the issue quite differently.

There is only one governor, and his name is Gray Davis.

Well, we're trying to patch and fix and put a cast on a broken system here. You can call it what you want, but we'll continue to purchase power in a private market.

We'll have a public power authority, which will also have the ability to build power or finance power. And more importantly, we'll have more power than our economy provides. All of that will give us leverage we don't have today.

I know that Duke made a number of demands, including that the attorney general drop its investigation. We have no intention of asking the attorney general to do that.

I don't know why they're doing it. I have to assume that their motives are positive, not negative. But they don't understand the severity of the problem in this state.

Desperate people lose the thing that makes them human beings. They lose their heart. Anger and hate fill them so that they act like animals.

Four years of football are calculated to breed in the average man more of the ingredients of success in life than almost any academic course he takes.

Beer will always have a definite role in the diet of an individual and can be considered a cog in the wheel of nutritional foods.

Hitchcock had a very strange mind.

I wanted to be a lawyer. I realized I don't really want to be a lawyer. I want to play a lawyer. Thank God I figured that out.

To gain what is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else.

Insanity destroys reason but not wit.

It is work, work that one delights in, that is the surest guarantor of happiness. But even here it is a work that has to be earned by labor in one's earlier years. One should labor so hard in youth that everything one does subsequently is easy by comparison.

Well, religion has been passed down through the years by stories people tell around the campfire. Stories about God, stories about love. Stories about good spirits and evil spirits.

I've worked on films where the budgets are almost limitless and you're in trailers that are bigger than a hotel room. You're taken care of and the food is amazing, the quality of the job is amazing and then you work on smaller things but it never dictates my happiness or my willingness to go to work.

I am pro-life, I believe in exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. That's my position, take it or leave it.

In 10 years, I'd love to live near the sea, in a warmer climate. I could see myself with three dogs... and it'd be great to share them with someone else.

I have had to work long and hard to eradicate the dangerous delusion that, in a bad position, I could always, or nearly always, conjure up some unexpected combination to extricate me from my difficulties.

It's a new challenge to see how people can change your look. I like words like transformation, reinvention, and chameleon. Because one word I don't like is predictable.

I'm not a conventional guy. I've never been a conventional guy.

I think I have more patience now than I did in the past.

There was a revolution going on at home. Why didn't I earn some money? Why didn't I do something practical, like chicken farming?

Feeling I'd scarcely arrived at a style, I now find I'm near the end of it. I'm not quite sure what Late Style means except that it's some sort of licence, a permit for ageing practitioners to kick their heels up.

No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may.

Any self-respecting entrepreneur has borrowed money from their mother at some point.

Well, it's a humor strip, so my first responsibility has always been to entertain the reader... But if, in addition, I can help move readers to thought and judgment about issues that concern me, so much the better.

Our Congress passes laws which subsidize corporation farms, oil companies, airlines, and houses for suburbia. But when they turn their attention to the poor, they suddenly become concerned about balancing the budget and cut back on the funds for Head Start, Medicare, and mental health appropriations.

I like vocabulary and I actually read a book called 'Word Freak,' which is about a guy who basically went into competitive Scrabble for a year. But having a big vocabulary and being good at Scrabble are not the same thing.

People are looking for inspiration, and my books are sometimes the vehicles of what people are looking for.