We would like to live as we once lived but history will not permit it.

We immigrants can sometimes sound a little hysterical about this because we come from places that have tried this and we know where it leads. Anybody who's lived in countries with socialized health care knows that it becomes the dominant political issue.

The essence of a government health care system - for people who have never lived under it and don't know - is waiting waiting waiting. You wait for everything. You wait for years for operations that are routine in America.

As a bookish child in Calcutta I used to thrill to the adventures of bad girls whose pursuit of happiness swept them outside the bounds of social decency. Tess of the d'Urbervilles Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina lived large in my imagination. The naughty girls of Hollywood films flirted and knew how to drive.

My biography of Frank Sinatra is not paean to his music but rather an illumination of the man behind the music who once described himself as 'an 18-karat manic-depressive who lived a life of violent emotional contradictions with an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as happiness.'

The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression all the time that I lived there that they do not want to be happy they want to be right.

Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore only the life I have lived. The pain now is part of the happiness then.

If there is not the war you don't get the great general if there is not a great occasion you don't get a great statesman if Lincoln had lived in a time of peace no one would have known his name.

These are not dark days: these are great days - the greatest days our country has ever lived.

I would have been glad to have lived under my wood side and to have kept a flock of sheep rather than to have undertaken this government.