Over the years my mother's steadfast faith in God has inspired me particularly when I had to perform extremely difficult surgical procedures or when I found myself faced with my own medical scare.

My father who died a few years ago was a good simple very honest man. His faith and affection for his family was just unassailable without question.

I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise than he was 6000 years ago.

It has now been over 7 years since Congress last raised the minimum wage to its current level of $5.15 per hour. Since that last increase Congress's failure to adjust the wage for inflation has reduced the purchasing power of the minimum wage to record low levels.

Over the next four years we will be bold. We will be willing to experiment. We will not fear failure.

And I went to New York and died for 10 years I walked those pavements. I can't think of New York without feeling uncomfortable and feeling like a failure.

We can't have a failure in Iraq but we also can't be there for the next 10 years because if we are it's going to become I think a failure in and of itself.

I believe my publisher has shown a great deal of faith in me over a lot of years but I'm not prepared to be so arrogant to say that the long-term literary value of my work would compensate them for a financial failure.

I don't know many people if any who have had some straight line toward success. I mean they start here they work hard they've got what it takes and they just go straight to the top over some number of years. Most people get a little failure.

My failure during the first five or six years of my art training to get set in the right direction and the disappointment which it caused me drove me the more persistently into writing as an alternative.