Quotes About Author

As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless; I found myself in a series of affectionate but chaste friendships.

proof of people's capacity to harness ingenuity in the service of madness.

he insisted that I move toward the center of people's lives

But if my own impact on Chicago was small, the city changed the arc of my life.

Promoting that story—a story that fed not trust but resentment—had come to define the modern Republican Party.

I signed an executive order banning torture and launched what was supposed to be a year-long process to close the U.S. military detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

and my wife beaming down from the upper gallery in her sleeveless dress (that was when the cult of Michelle's arms truly took off), waving

I had never intended the book to serve as a campaign manifesto; I just wanted to present my ideas about the current state of American politics in an interesting way and sell enough copies to justify my sizable advance.

More than anything, though, my fascination with India had to do with Mahatma Gandhi. Along with Lincoln, King, and Mandela, Gandhi had profoundly influenced my thinking.

Clinton himself understood that globalization involved not only new economic challenges but also new security challenges.

carrying all the same baggage. All the same anger, all the same pent-up frustrations, all the same messages.

When I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president…the most important stuff I've learned I think I've learned from novels. It has to do with empathy. President Obama, in conversation with Marilynne Robinson, in New York Review of Books

the will to conquer other people's minds or territories or aspirations…is meaningless.

would have sympathized more had I not known that high-ranking Communist Party officials—including Wen—had a habit of steering state contracts and licenses to family members and siphoning billions into offshore accounts.

Your own Self-realization is the greatest service you can render the world.

I had discovered that writing--with whatever instrument--was a powerful aid to thinking, and thinking was what I now resolved to do.

She represents something about the corporate world that repel me, some deep coldness masked as relentless cheerfulness.

I understood that no one could have lobbed such a stinging wad of shame out into the world without having a considerable personal reserve of it to draw on.

was the most powerful ruler in the western

It is a terrible mistake to put the rifles of tomorrow into the hands of the ignorance of yesterday.

Slavery, January understood now as he never had before, made you fear change almost more than anything else.

Women so frequently turn out like their mothers I don't know why I was even surprised.

A catless writer is almost inconceivable. It's a perverse taste, really, since it would be easier to write with a herd of buffalo in the room than even one cat; they make nests in the notes and bite the end of the pen and walk on the typewriter keys.

There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief.