In the spring of 1994 I decided not to seek reelection to the Senate. I had made the decision 12 years earlier Christmas Day of 1982 just after I had been first elected to a full term that I would do the best I could for a limited time.

I had eight brothers and sisters. Every Christmas my younger brother Bobby would wake up extra early and open everybody's presents - everybody's - so by the time the rest of us got up all the gifts were shredded ribbons off torn open and thrown aside.

My Christmas wish would be to have an entire week off. To spend it with my family and just curl up and watch Christmas movies when it's snowing outside.

My mother would give my brothers and me a pile of catalogues and let us pick what we wanted for Christmas.

May I share with you my earliest memory of a political row? It was with my mother about the Queen - classic Freudian stuff shrinks would say. I was eight and refusing to watch the Queen's Christmas Day broadcast.

From a commercial point of view if Christmas did not exist it would be necessary to invent it.

What I had to prove was that I had a dedication and a desire and a passion to do the work and everything else would fall in place because I have a vision that I want to portray and it did and I do it. I don't sell anything.

The thing about the 600 words I mean some day you can do a very very very hard day's work and not write a word just revising or you would scribble a few words.

The things that have always been important: to be a good man to try to live my life the way God would have me to turn it over to Him that His will might be worked in my life to do my work without looking back to give it all I've got and to take pride in my work as an honest performer.

It is not real work unless you would rather be doing something else.