I never had a single conversation about politics with Ross Perot in my life; still haven't.

Yeah. I mean, it just seemed to me that it was - I felt so helpless to this business of not having any papers. That seems like a throwback to a schoolboy.

I think character is permanent, and issues are transient.

There was nothing there but black water and American fire power.

They were heading out to the middle of the bay - the Gulf - that's another thing that became kind of standard practice, we didn't hurry the destroyers around the beach any more, when it got dark, we'd take 'em out thirty or forty miles out in the middle of the Tonkin Gulf.

The guy that just arranges things so that the stock market holds up is nobody in my - in my estimation.

In order to do something you must be something.

We couldn't generalize on the people. Some of them were known to be tough guys and they didn't say much, but some of them were kind of soft-headed, but they did that. That was an East German film.

But there were highs as well as lows, it was as though they said everybody was picking on the man who had more practical real life experiences than the whole batch of them put together.

Sybil's my wife, and on the first day of October, that's the first time I knew Ross was going to run.

This idea, as you know, that I have firm convictions that the idea of issues being a big deal where our mutual friend went back and he felt so strongly that the determining factor in electoral success should be a proven character.

And so, I mean, he declared war right there and then in so many words and Alex says later in the book, nobody in the White House from that point on had any doubt that we were going to bomb the mainland of Asia.

I was commanding officer of a supersonic fighter squadron, FA Crusaders.

He's a novice, but he's had these - he's experienced in leadership in tight circumstances. He started - he dropped the first bomb, led the first air strike into North Vietnam.

They can shout down the head of the physics department at Cal Tech.

I'm a grown man. You know, I've been in a lot of scrapes, but I never felt like I got so - there are probably a lot of things I should have done that I didn't do.

On the eighteenth of December 1972, when we thought we were getting another of the hundreds of little tactical air raids, we heard the bombs going in out there in the railroad yards and this went on for about thirty minutes.

I mean, I didn't - I should have demanded attention of the boss maybe, or something like that that might have backfired. This I would just take as it came.

Well, first of all, I was asked by Ross Perot on a telephone call in March of 1992 if, since he had committed on the Larry King Show to becoming a candidate for president, to get on all 50 ballots.

I was tortured fifteen times, that's total submission. They did that with shutting off your blood circulation with ropes, giving you claustrophobia and pain at the same time, bending you double.

Half the issues they - are so polished they're talking about - are dead by the time they get into the office, and into the midst of their tour where they're really productive.

And we had our own laws. I mean, I wrote them. And we had our own customs, and traditions, and proprieties.

So the first thing that went on was to decide... trying to find a time when we could get reprisal raids out.

I never had a single conversation about politics with Ross Perot in my life; still haven't.

I was commanding officer of a supersonic fighter squadron, F-8 Crusaders.

On the eighteenth of December 1972 when we thought we were getting another of the hundreds of little tactical air raids we heard the bombs going in out there in the railroad yards and this went on for about thirty minutes.

The challenge of education is not to prepare a person for success, but to prepare him for failure.

I just use my muscles as a conversation piece, like someone walking a cheetah down 42nd Street.

Food was a constant topic of conversation in our household.

A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.

Don't knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn't start a conversation if it didn't change once in a while.

What I think we need to do to engage the American people in a conversation about entitlement reform is to have a bipartisan group of people who come together and put every solution on the table, every alternative on the table. And then we ought to engage in a long conversation with the American people so they understand the choices.

It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much.

If you're interested in how people behave, if you're interested in the way they talk about themselves, the way the conceive of themselves, it's very hard to ignore drugs nowadays, because that is so much part of the conversation.

No animal should ever jump up on the dining-room furniture unless absolutely certain that he can hold his own in the conversation.

Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.

Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good plays, good company, good conversation - what are they? They are the happiest people in the world.

Although there exist many thousand subjects for elegant conversation, there are persons who cannot meet a cripple without talking about feet.

I've been in a serious conversation with one of my children, and a fan has come up. I've been in a public bathroom and had the hand come under the stall with a paper and pen. That sort of thing anybody can live without.

Tonight was a great opportunity to take on the political status quo that has given us trillion dollar deficits and put millions out of work. Our objective was to inject some common sense into the conversation among Republicans at a time when business-as-usual simply won't work.

Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.

I can wear a hat or take it off, but either way it's a conversation piece.

The difficulty with this conversation is that it's very different from most of the ones I've had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees.

A good pun may be admitted among the smaller excellencies of lively conversation.

I spend a good portion of my dinner-party conversation defending America because no matter what the political agenda, it's still a fantastic, amazing place.

Well, my closest friends are still the ones that I went to school with, but it's nice to go to work, at the studios, and have people there that you're willing to talk to and have a good conversation with.

There was a sense of all the things that go on on the street, particularly in New York, that you are just completely unaware of, that that conversation could be happening at any time. I loved the instability of the camera. It's just an unstable world.

For most women, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships.

If you are ever at a loss to support a flagging conversation, introduce the subject of eating.