To be educated a person doesn't have to know much or be informed but he or she does have to have been exposed vulnerably to the transformative events of an engaged human life.

I am not opposed to intelligence reform on its face but any changes should reflect the current context.

In Spain we should have enough intelligence enough sense of individual and collective responsibility to do for ourselves that which would be imposed upon us by a dictatorship.

When I resigned I put the U.S. Government on notice that I'm going to stick to policy issues that I have no intention of going out and blowing the cover off of the intelligence operations that those are truly sensitive and they should not be exposed.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

Heaven knows I've exposed myself in my novels through the use of fantasy and imagination... now my new book is about what really happened to me... not my heroines.

I grew up in the '80s where there's a lot of these kind of post-apocalyptic post-comet post-whatever it was so that always captured my imagination a lot as a little kid that idea of getting access to secret places and being able to roam around where you're not supposed to.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are the more you're forced back on your own imagination.

I think films about men are often about characters who don't want to express their feelings. You're supposed to kind of admire them for not expressing their feelings. And I feel that's a bit dull. Women's stories often have stronger emotional content which I enjoy doing. What I really love doing is mixing that with humor.

The thing about For Better or Worse is the only thing that made me an okay director for that is that I have a sense of humor and it was supposed to be funny.

I hope I'm in a position to make stuff that I really want to make as opposed to stuff that I just have to make for money reasons or to sustain a certain marquee value.

There is something uniquely depressing about the fact that the National Portrait Gallery's version of the Barack Obama 'Hope' poster previously belonged to a pair of lobbyists. Depressing because Mr. Obama's Washington was not supposed to be the lobbyists' Washington the place we learned to despise during the last administration.

I hope that the mistakes made and suffering imposed upon Japanese Americans nearly 60 years ago will not be repeated against Arab Americans whose loyalties are now being called into question.

Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope by a limit imposed from without but falsely identified as lying within.

I'm just like so many women - I was frustrated I had these white pants that I had spent a lot of money on and you get home and you think 'What am I really supposed to wear under this?' So it was a frustrated consumer moment.

My first holiday to San Francisco in 1998-99 was supposed to be a two-week vacation but I ended up staying five weeks and nearly didn't come home.

There are more than 300 000 families in the Gulf region that lost their homes and are waiting for peace of mind. The hurricane exposed the sad reality of poverty in America. We saw in all its horrific detail the vulnerabilities of living in inadequate housing and the heartbreak of losing one's home.

Of all the species of literary composition perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed which is wanting in general history.

Most foreign policies that history has marked highly in whatever country have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.

What is sad for women of my generation is that they weren't supposed to work if they had families. What were they going to do when the children are grown - watch the raindrops coming down the window pane?

I've declined every congressional benefit I could decline federal health insurance the retirement program the 403(b) program which I think is overly generous. I've got self-imposed term limits of six terms if I have the privilege to serve that long.

You bet every member of Congress who votes for this bill ought to read it read it thoroughly and understand that what we're looking at here amounts to nothing more than a government takeover of our health care economy paid for with nearly a trillion dollars in new taxes on individuals and small businesses. And it must be opposed.

I am opposed to anybody making a decision for you or me or anybody else about what health care plan we should have.

The fact is that we would have had comprehensive health care now had it not been for Ted Kennedy's deliberately blocking the legislation that I proposed in 1978 or '79.