Poets have said that the reason to have children is to give yourself immortality. Immortality? Now that I have five children my only hope is that they are all out of the house before I die.

Hope is the last thing a person does before they are defeated.

However I was a restaurant critic at Chicago magazine before I worked at Esquire and I've been a really enthusiastic home cook for a long time. It's just something I'm passionate about.

I think I started learning lessons about being a good person long before I ever knew what basketball was. And that starts in the home it starts with the parental influence.

Before I had kids I'd go out on the road for months and months at a time but now I don't think I'd want to do that anymore because I'd miss too much time at home so it's just a matter of monitoring how much work that I do and how much time I'm on the road.

Don't kid yourself. President Obama's decision to withdraw 33 000 troops from Afghanistan before he stands for reelection is not driven by the United States' 'position of strength' in the war zone as much as it is by grim economic and political realities at home.

I maintain the rather old-fashioned view that this is my work and it's in the public arena but that doesn't entitle everyone to know what happened at home before coming here.

I stand before you as the governor of Texas but also stand before you the son of two tenant farmers. Ray Perry who came home after 35 bombing missions over Europe to work his little corner of land out there and Amelia who made sure that my sister Milla and I had everything that we needed included hand sewing my clothes until I went off to college.

For example I was a White House intern the summer before I dropped out of law school. Everybody knew about it. I'd come home and go to church and everybody would say 'Oh my God. Demetri you're working at the White House.'

The only way I'd be caught without makeup is if my radio fell in the bathtub while I was taking a bath and electrocuted me and I was in between makeup at home. I hope my husband would slap a little lipstick on me before he took me to the morgue.