I hope I die before I get old.

Theater is of course a reflection of life. Maybe we have to improve life before we can hope to improve theater.

The secret is not to give up hope. It's very hard not to because if you're really doing something worthwhile I think you will be pushed to the brink of hopelessness before you come through the other side.

Poets have said that the reason to have children is to give yourself immortality. Immortality? Now that I have five children my only hope is that they are all out of the house before I die.

Hope is the last thing a person does before they are defeated.

However I was a restaurant critic at Chicago magazine before I worked at Esquire and I've been a really enthusiastic home cook for a long time. It's just something I'm passionate about.

I think I started learning lessons about being a good person long before I ever knew what basketball was. And that starts in the home it starts with the parental influence.

Before I had kids I'd go out on the road for months and months at a time but now I don't think I'd want to do that anymore because I'd miss too much time at home so it's just a matter of monitoring how much work that I do and how much time I'm on the road.

Don't kid yourself. President Obama's decision to withdraw 33 000 troops from Afghanistan before he stands for reelection is not driven by the United States' 'position of strength' in the war zone as much as it is by grim economic and political realities at home.

I maintain the rather old-fashioned view that this is my work and it's in the public arena but that doesn't entitle everyone to know what happened at home before coming here.

I stand before you as the governor of Texas but also stand before you the son of two tenant farmers. Ray Perry who came home after 35 bombing missions over Europe to work his little corner of land out there and Amelia who made sure that my sister Milla and I had everything that we needed included hand sewing my clothes until I went off to college.

For example I was a White House intern the summer before I dropped out of law school. Everybody knew about it. I'd come home and go to church and everybody would say 'Oh my God. Demetri you're working at the White House.'

The only way I'd be caught without makeup is if my radio fell in the bathtub while I was taking a bath and electrocuted me and I was in between makeup at home. I hope my husband would slap a little lipstick on me before he took me to the morgue.

Before deciding to retire stay home for a week and watch the daytime TV shows.

If we got into a situation where people start burning our records then bring it on. That's the whole point. The gloaming has begun. We're in the darkness. This has happened before. Go read some history.

Since I was there in the very beginning I know the history of the characters. So I make comments about the tone and sometimes remind the writers that we've done that before.

It was one of those great miracles of history that they managed to smuggle an Enigma machines out to Britain just before they were invaded by the Nazis.

More people have more access to more readers for less money than ever before in history. It means a lot of dross but it means a lot of very talented people can find and nurture a readership in ways that were not possible twenty years ago. From a creative perspective that is all that writing is about.

I'm quite good at taking in information so I voraciously inhale Wikipedia - which may have some things wrong in it but I think is generally more information than we had before. Last tour we didn't have Wikipedia. And then Discovery Channel and History Channel. I can take it in and retain what I think are the most important facts.

OUR history begins before we are born. We represent the hereditary influences of our race and our ancestors virtually live in us.

Let me tell you never before in the history of this planet has anybody made the progress that African-Americans have made in a 30-year period in spite of many black folks and white folks lying to one another.

If you take a look at history you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards in order to express this idea.

My generation of bossy confident baby-boom women were something brand new in history. Our energy and assertiveness weren't created by Betty Friedan unknown before her 1963 book or by Gloria Steinem whose political activism as even the Lifetime profile admitted did not begin until 1969.

In many ways history is marked as 'before' and 'after' Rosa Parks. She sat down in order that we all might stand up and the walls of segregation came down.