As a small business owner for the last 15 years when I think of what truly changed my life it was my faith a strong family my mom did a really really good job of encouraging me in very clear and discernible ways.

My mother's family were full-on Irish Catholics - faith in an elaborate old fashioned highly conservative and madly baroque style. I sort of fell out of the tribe over women's rights and social justice issues when I was just 13 years old.

So many of my friends are still trying to get record deals and I've had one for 10 years now where my only goal is to make the best music I can make. I've been very lucky. I have great faith that I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be and whatever happens is going to be absolutely right for me.

I've spent the last 50 years or so steeping myself in the world's religions and I've done my homework. I've gone to each of the world's eight great religions and sought out the most profound scholars I could find and I've apprenticed myself to them and actually practiced each faith.

There were periods of my life when a lot of people didn't believe in me. I still had faith in myself. I really had to ask myself life questions. Where do I see myself in five years? Create a ladder for yourself and walk up the steps. Climb that ladder.

Since I was an atheist for many years and came to believe in God through my studies in science it frustrated me to see students and parents who viewed faith and science as enemies.

My faith is an important part of my life and over the years I've learnt that it takes a proud man to say he doesn't need anything. It has been a quiet strength and a backbone through a lot of difficult times.

I am shy to admit that I have followed the advice given all those years ago by a wise archbishop to a bewildered young man: that moments of unbelief 'don't matter ' that if you return to a practice of the faith faith will return.

If you went to your closet today would you pull out the same outfit you wore 10 or 15 years ago? You wear feelings and faith differently as well.

While we remain a nation decisively shaped by religious faith our politics and our culture are in the main less influenced by movements and arguments of an explicitly Christian character than they were even five years ago. I think this is a good thing - good for our political culture.

Over the years my mother's steadfast faith in God has inspired me particularly when I had to perform extremely difficult surgical procedures or when I found myself faced with my own medical scare.

My father who died a few years ago was a good simple very honest man. His faith and affection for his family was just unassailable without question.

I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise than he was 6000 years ago.

It has now been over 7 years since Congress last raised the minimum wage to its current level of $5.15 per hour. Since that last increase Congress's failure to adjust the wage for inflation has reduced the purchasing power of the minimum wage to record low levels.

Over the next four years we will be bold. We will be willing to experiment. We will not fear failure.

And I went to New York and died for 10 years I walked those pavements. I can't think of New York without feeling uncomfortable and feeling like a failure.

We can't have a failure in Iraq but we also can't be there for the next 10 years because if we are it's going to become I think a failure in and of itself.

I believe my publisher has shown a great deal of faith in me over a lot of years but I'm not prepared to be so arrogant to say that the long-term literary value of my work would compensate them for a financial failure.

I don't know many people if any who have had some straight line toward success. I mean they start here they work hard they've got what it takes and they just go straight to the top over some number of years. Most people get a little failure.

My failure during the first five or six years of my art training to get set in the right direction and the disappointment which it caused me drove me the more persistently into writing as an alternative.

If you're 40 years old and you've never had a failure you've been deprived.

My only failure was the restaurant in Myrtle Beach. I kept it open for four years. It was in a tourist town it was only busy four and half five months of the year. But the bills kept coming all year.

It's probably foolish to expect relationships to go on forever and to say that because something only lasts 10 years it's a failure.

A minute's success pays the failure of years.