My mom said my whole childhood... was stop and go.
I remember one time I went to Craigslist to find something; that's how bad I wanted it. It was a pair of Raf Simons - this was like 2010. But Raf said he was going to make them for me.
At an ERA fundraiser years ago, one of my favorite buttons was the one that said, 'Every mother is a working mother.'
Laura Bush has the face of my mother when my mother was young. The face, the body, the voice. The first time I saw on TV Laura Bush, I got frozen because it was as if my mother was not dead. 'Oh, Mama,' I said, 'Mama.'
I bought a racehorse, Tropical Saint, that belonged to the Queen Mother. I used to go down to Banbury and watch him train, but during a televised race, his jockey pulled up and said there was something wrong. They put him in the grass to try and settle him but found him dead in the field.
In my 40s - when I was giving to the Red Cross, United Jewish Appeal and other charities - I said to myself, this is all well and good, but these are really amorphous things, and maybe there are some causes out there that I really give a damn about.
When all is said and done, we exist only in relation to the world, and our senses evolved as scouts who bridge that divide and provide volumes of information, warnings and rewards.
The Europeans and Americans have said the martyrdom operations are why Hamas has been put on the terrorist list. But now these operations have stopped. Did they then remove Hamas from the list of terrorist organisations? We do not launch wars. We are people resisting occupation.
Sometimes you see a movie and you can really feel that it's an actor putting in a performance. Someone said 'cut' and they're back in their trailer having a coffee or getting their hair done.
We're going to teach and broaden sort of the cultural impact of respect and dignity, regardless of where you're sitting. And that's why we've said once you've boarded an aircraft, we're not going to take you off except for safety and security.
Somebody asked me earlier if I thought it was really important to tell stories about women's struggles. And I said yes, but at the same time, it's also important to tell stories about women's triumphs, women being slackers, women being criminals, women being heroes.
I've never said I'm a communist.
You know, one of the things my husband says when people say 'Well, what did you bring to Washington,' he said, 'Well, I brought arithmetic.'
I saw an interview that I did with someone, and I was horrified by it. And I said to my wife, 'This is unbearable how I talk.'
That's the most terrible thing about being an author - standing there at your mother's funeral, but you don't switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said - one of the famous lady novelists - 'unhappy is the family that contains an author'?
A lot of people have said that I'm super-snarky and mean. But honesty is the only way to get people to change. It's very important to be constructively critical - give people alternatives and you're giving them a new way to see themselves.
It is said that the night brings counsel, but it is not said that the counsel is necessarily good.
It's sometimes said that I'm rebellious and I do things to push people's buttons, but I just like the challenge.
I was talking to Rupert Murdoch the other day at a lunch, and he said, 'Maybe I'll live to 100'. He actually thinks he will live to 100!
I never said I was a genius.
I auditioned for a movie recently, and when I went in, the producer said he'd told one of its stars, Naomi Watts, that he was auditioning me, and she'd said, 'She's so funny; she's a great actress - you should hire her.' What a lovely, kind, and supportive thing to do for another woman.
When I became director of CIA, it was just clear to me intuitively, without a whole lot of science behind it, that we had expanded rapidly and inefficiently. So I arbitrarily picked a number, 10 percent, and I said over the next 12 months, we are going to reduce our reliance on contractors by 10 percent.
If you're a woman and a guy's ever said anything romantic to you, he just left off the second part that would have made you sick if you could have heard it.
The ultimate relationship between justice and law will be an eternal subject for speculation and analysis. But it may be said that in a democratic society, law is the form which free men give to justice.
I couldn't do 'The Ed Sullivan Show.' Ed said I was a flash in the pan, and he was right.
I'm not someone who's particularly in touch with the way they feel. I've heard it said that you should be a 'human being' not a 'human doing', but I'm a human doing, very much so.
Whatever I have said is in the interest of the system, and it has never been taken amiss.
Though there are some notable exceptions, by and large the persistent ranting of the Warren Commission critics, some of whom were screaming the word 'conspiracy' before the fatal bullet had even come to rest, came to remind me, as H. L. Mencken said in a different context, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights.
My mother has often said that the issue of women is the unfinished business of the 21st century. That is certainly true. But so, too, are the issues of LGBTQ rights the unfinished business of the 21st century.
Our founders said that everybody mattered, everybody counted. But we all know that they didn't count everybody at the beginning. They did somehow have confidence that each generation of Americans would do a better job with it and would bring more and more people in from the margins and into the heart and soul of our democracy.
Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, 'Don't try.' That fits the writing, too. I don't try; I just type.
I don't go back and read my own stuff too much, but there are times where I second-guess myself and said I could have done something different, like a line of dialogue.
My wife, she is so good. She was a famous singer - had a show in Carnegie Hall, did a big city tour for RCA. Then she made the mistake of marrying me. The next year, another tour, but the third year, she had Mario and said, 'Either I'm a mother or a singer.'
And to me, it was interesting, some of the people I had interviewed who knew the insides to this program said that they also, to create anxiety and upset in the soldiers, they take Bibles and they trash them.
I had one incident where my daughter said that a girl asked if she was a brown person. I said, 'We're black. You have black people, white people, Chinese people, Hispanic people; we're all brought up differently.'
People have said I can come off a little trial-lawyerish. I tell people I never actually became a lawyer, but I play one at City Hall.
