President Obama has basically avoided or not done any attempt to intervene in any positive way in the housing market. I think in the financial crisis that's been a shame.

Broadcasters or politicians or writers who think that they are respecting Struggle Street the battlers by dumbing things down into one-line sound bites are not respecting them they are treating them with contempt. It's our job above all in politics to tackle the big issues and to explain them.

In politics nothing is contemptible.

Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.

We don't attempt to have any theme for a number of the anthology or to have any particular sequence. We just put in things that we like and then we try to alternate the prose and the poetry.

My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.

Every goal every action every thought every feeling one experiences whether it be consciously or unconsciously known is an attempt to increase one's level of peace of mind.

I pity the young woman who will attempt to insinuate herself between my mama's boy and me. I sympathize with the monumental nature of her task. It will take a crowbar two bulldozers and half a dozen Molotov cocktails to pry my Oedipus and me loose from one another.

What I'm attempting to do is to show people that if I can spend some time with very dangerous spiders and snakes and scorpions then maybe they'll feel different about the spiders and snakes they find around their areas. I don't need people to keep them as pets. I just like them to be respectful and see that everything in nature has its place.

Those who made and endorsed our Constitution knew man's nature and it is to their ideas rather than to the temptations of utopia that we must ask that our judges adhere.