Power and position often make a man trifle with the truth.

The places I visit in any given week are my home so when I'm somewhere that feels good to me it's a real game changer. If a place causes me to have a strong reaction be it positive or negative it'll often find its way into my music.

Sometimes negative news does come out but it is often exaggerated and manipulated to spread scandal. Journalists sometimes risk becoming ill from coprophilia and thus fomenting coprophagia: which is a sin that taints all men and women that is the tendency to focus on the negative rather than the positive aspects.

I have a lot of younger fans obviously the choices I make often influence them. But having said that it's kind of the best motivation in the world to stay positive and make good choices.

I have a treadmill and I work out with my trainer Julie Diamond as often as possible. She's so positive.

Together often by unanimous vote the council has worked quickly to get positive results.

Constructive criticism is about finding something good and positive to soften the blow to the real critique of what really went on.

There is this concept of politics as a dirty game. It's a difficult game but it doesn't have to be dirty. I think this is what we need to bring to politics. I think politics around the world has very often been captured by big interests - 'lobbies' they call them in the States.

It is important to recognize and politics positive thinking is often the slaves' virtue - something that people do to con themselves about the burden and change being placed upon them.

But being in the closet uniquely assisted me in politics. From my first run for the state legislature until my election as governor all too often I was not leading but following my best guess at public opinion.

Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting but they have something missing in their natures there is a hole an empty place and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen.

I came into politics because I wished to change things. You can't do that by lying to people you have to educate and persuade and carry them with you - and it's often a long haul.

Of course there are regrets. I shall regret always that I found my own authentic voice in politics. I was too conservative too conventional. Too safe too often. Too defensive. Too reactive. Later too often on the back foot.

Talk of citizenship today is often thin and tinny. The word has a faintly old-fashioned feel to it when used in everyday conversation. When evoked in national politics it's usually accompanied by the shrill whine of a descending culture-war mortar.

Economics politics and personalities are often inseparable.

Compromise makes a good umbrella but a poor roof it is temporary expedient often wise in party politics almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship.

Reporters thrive on the world's misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.

When you're looking that far out you're giving people their place in the universe it touches people. Science is often visual so it doesn't need translation. It's like poetry it touches you.

Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.

I've often entertained paranoid suspicions about my fridge and what it's been doing to my poetry when I'm not looking but I never even considered that my fan was thinking about me.

Even the people who have had success and made money writing these books of fiction seem to feel the need to pretend it's no big deal or part of a natural progression from poetry to fiction but often it's really just about the money the perceived prestige.

Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one's geographic landscape sometimes out of one's cultural myths and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins.

Because in fact women feminists do read my poetry and they read it often with the power of their political interpretation. I don't care that's what poetry is supposed to do.

Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry as such.