If you start becoming withdrawn and looking over your shoulder, being careful about what you say, that's being paranoid. This is an open, accessible team. That's been my trademark for years.
I got cocky and I stopped taking my vitamins. It was an inconvenience to have a suitcase full of vitamins with me on the road. About two years ago, it caught up with me.
The one thing I have wanted to stay away from is the steroids. When I had an attack two years ago in my home state of Mississippi, they put me on steroids, thinking they were doing the right thing, and I had a violent reaction.
I have seen doctors, in good faith, leave patients on steroids for years, thinking they are doing right. A friend of mine was on steroids for so long, she has severe osteoporosis.
I have just gone over my comet computations again, and it is humiliating to perceive how very little more I know than I did seven years ago when I first did this kind of work.
In the spring of 1994 I decided not to seek reelection to the Senate. I had made the decision 12 years earlier, Christmas Day of 1982, just after I had been first elected to a full term, that I would do the best I could for a limited time.
I got a job with a law firm in Portland after a couple of years with Senator Muskie. But by then, my interest in politics had been sparked, through meeting Senator Muskie, through seeing what he did.
As they say, one thing led to another, and, ultimately, the British and Irish governments asked me to serve as chairman of the peace negotiations, which ironically began six years ago this week.
I spent two years in the Army. And my older brother, who was also a great positive influence on me, encouraged me to think about law school, and I said - well, I didn't have any money.
