It's always in the second administration when things start to go sour. They circle the wagons.

The first term of the Clinton administration was very jolly. Everybody was running around meeting people and of course, in the second term, everyone went down the black hole, which also happened at the end of the Reagan administration.

I think, certainly in the more civilized societies, women's roles are growing in power all of the time.

Often what we do is open our house for various charity events. I don't seat according to protocol. I don't invite people because of who they are in the administration or their positions of power. The few who do come, are there because I like them.

I first came on the scene during the Johnson years and that crowd was out all the time enjoying themselves. Nixon wasn't particularly social but a lot of the people in his administration were.

Even Colin Powell who was everywhere before he became secretary of state, just stopped going out. I think part of it was he didn't want to be viewed suspiciously by the other people in the White House who rarely go anywhere.

Every poll shows that most journalists are Democrats.

It is only in the fundamentalist religions that women are relegated to second class. Radical Evangelicals, Muslims, and Jews all have the same view of women.

This morning in the Washington Post there was a statistic about how 85% of Americans are Christians.

I had cottage cheese for lunch and a glass of wine when I got home tonight.

I was brought up by an Episcopalian father and Presbyterian mother in nondenominational Army chapels all over the world and never really had much religious experience.

We've been together 32 years and married for 27.

Last week I did a piece for Style on advice to Laura Bush about how to help her husband. This week it's religion. It just depends on what I find interesting at the moment.

It's always in the second administration when things start to go sour. They circle the wagons.

Most of the people who live in Washington come from other places and you can learn something from them.

We're newspaper junkies; I can't imagine life without a newspaper.

Then my mother had several strokes and my father, who was 85, couldn't handle it, so Donna came back and we went through the same thing here. She lives in Mill Valley; her group is organizing this event.

Funny you mention my dinner parties when I have just suggested that inviting close friends over to share a meal with candlelight and wine at your table could be a form of religious experience for some people. To me it's a form of sacrament.

The football season is like pain. You forget how terrible it is until it seizes you again.

I never know what I'm going to do for the Post next. Two weeks ago I had a piece on Homeland Security. This is one of my pig ongoing projects. How unprepared we are for a terrorist attack.

Newspapers don't write enough about serious religious issues.

I don't like to play characters that are too perfect.

I've broken my nose, I've broken ribs. You name it. In fact, we just got back from South America, and I fell over a monitor speaker on the stage and almost ended up in the front row of the audience. I managed to sprain my wrist on that one but luckily nothing was broken.

A pen is different from the pad, the key, moving your fingers across a screen. I like both. I like to work on sketchbooks, big old white sketch paper. I like how that feels, and I like to put different media on it. Then there's the phone, smartphone, iPad: It's the new page, and it's not the same page anymore.

All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.

Ultimately its a sense of camaraderie and friendship with local people that is core to my journeys.

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.

Its an ongoing joy being a dad.

Berlin inspired Bowie and stirred him to write about real, important matters.

Delegation requires the willingness to pay for short term failures in order to gain long term competency.

I always love novels that open up a subject to me - like raising a window to a beautiful, mysterious world outside.

In my experience, it's all wonderful with girls until about 16. Around that time, boys kind of calm down and start focusing their testosterone. Girls get a little challenging, especially for fathers.

It's also a reasonable scientific program to look at the dynamics of the standard model and to try to prove from that dynamics that it is computationally capable.

I have no political aspirations, although a lot of people believe that politics and acting go hand in hand.

I'm a huge Wu-Tang fan.

All promise outruns performance.

I think dry nanotechnology is probably a dead-end.

The future is going to require really smart people. What we think are crises today probably will be no big deal, and we have no idea what will really be crises in the future.

Sometimes we get too possessive with someone we don' even own. It's a side effect of loving too much, and receiving too little.

Love is cheering and sharing and compassion and giving and receiving. Love is an action thing more than a word thing, that brings comfort or joy or relief to anyone or anything.

Eighty to 90 percent of success in a company has nothing to do with business at all - it's all personal.

There is no way now to get around some use of embryos. But my goal is to avoid using them.

Neurologically, I'm a quadriplegic, so virtually everything about my work has been driven by my learning disabilities, which are quite severe, and my lack of facial recognition, which I'm sure is what drove me to paint portraits in the first place.

My cares come from a very selfish place 'cause in reality I'm young, and I haven't had the experience to be mature yet.

Meditation is offering your genuine presence to yourself in every moment.