Youth is a quality not unlike health: it's found in greater abundance among the young, but we all need access to it.

I have the same interests as women. Well, apart from football and music, obviously. I've always had as many female friends as male ones. The novels I read as a young man were all by women writers, and when I started writing, I wanted to set my books inside the home.

At a crude estimate, I must have played 'Thunder Road' 1,500 times.

Words don't come very easily to me. Which, given my profession, is a worrying impediment.

The lessons I learned from my mother and her friends have guided me through death, birth, loss, love, failure, and achievement, on to a Fulbright scholarship and Harvard Business School. They taught me to believe that anything was possible. They have proven to be the strongest family values I could ever have imagined.

Most of us are afraid of our success, that we will actually be great.

Support each other as is needed to achieve goals for the benefit of the people and the nation's security.

In the so-called age of girl power, we have failed to cut loose our most regressive standards of female success - like pleasing others and looking sexy - and to replace them with something more progressive - like valuing intelligence and hard work.