The White House used to belong to the American people. At least that's what I learned from history books and from covering every president starting with John F. Kennedy.

I'd only read a bit of the first book. And I just knew about all the media furor over it. But I'd not read books 2 or 3. I'd just read a bit of it. And I'd seen the films.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

I've always felt, in all my books, that there's a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence - providing they have the facts, providing they have the information.

All the other books ask, 'What's it like?' What was World War II like for the young kid at Normandy, or what is work like for a woman having a job for the first time in her life? What's it like to be black or white?

I had to learn chord shapes. I bought books with chord charts. I used to listen to all kinds of pop music.

My heart goes out to victims and survivors of the Hurricane Katrina tragedy and to their families. This disaster will go down in history books as one of the largest natural disasters in U.S. history.

The books I loved in childhood - the first loves - I've read so often that I've internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out.

I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house.

You write a book and you hope somebody will go out and pay $24.95 for what you've just said. I think books were my salvation. Books saved me from being miserable.

My books are about losers, about people who've lost their way and are engaged in a search.

I'm obsessed with books.

Books, the children of the brain.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

All I'm asking for is the law that's been on the books for the last 33 years, no public funding for abortion. We are both saying the same thing, pro-life, pro-choice. Let's find the language that works for both of us so we can pass health care.