I find that the hardest work in the world... is to persuade Easterners that growing up in the West is not intellectually crippling.

I think probably one of the important things that happened to me was growing up in Idaho in the mountains, in the woods, and having a very strong presence of the wilderness around me. That never felt like emptiness. It always felt like presence.

Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I'm attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary science, by the literatures of antiquity.

I really enjoyed my kids. They were good boys, you know, and interesting. And they didn't wear me out.

We must all learn a good lesson - how to live together. That is the new challenge of the new world... learning to co-exist and not co-annihilate.

My mom and dad were 'helicopter parents,' literally. Meaning, I didn't have a nanny, so I went up in the helicopter. My entire early childhood education consisted of tagging along while they reported on car accidents, multiple-alarm fires, and shootouts.

We stand for getting government out of the way, letting people make good decisions for themselves, in education, returning power to school boards and to teachers and to parents so they can educate the children.

Experience was my only teacher; I knew little of the modern art movement. When I first saw the works of the Impressionists, van Gogh, van Dongen, and Fauves, I admired it. But I had to seek the true way alone.