American Quotes

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

Until a friend or relative has applied a particular proverb to your own life, or until you've watched him apply the proverb to his own life, it has no power to sway you.

Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?

Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for.

You don't need to know who's playing on the White House tennis court to be a good president.

When you have energy companies like Shell and British Petroleum, both of which are perhaps represented in this room, saying there is a problem with excess carbon dioxide emission, I think we ought to listen.

This is what happens, when, for the first time in modern history, a candidate resorts to lawsuits to try to overturn the outcome of an election for president.

Sometimes you move publicly, sometimes privately. Sometimes quietly, sometimes at the top of your voice.

Sometimes an active policy is best advanced by doing nothing until the right time - or never.

Never let the other fellow set the agenda.

I understand personally that it is frustrating to lose presidential elections by narrow margins.

You've got to guard against speaking more clearly than you think.

The central question is simply put: What did the president know and when did he know it?

We must examine then the concerns of the Government of Japan about the language of the treaty itself - of SOFA - and of the interim and further arrangements that have been made since 1995, and see whether or not we need to make any changes. Those are decisions I cannot make.

It is almost always the cover-up rather than the event that causes trouble.

I think and hope and believe that the Japanese government and the people of Japan will be happy and content with the progress of justice in this case and that it will not become a great issue in the future.

I intend to travel to Okinawa and to visit with Okinawa officials and the citizens of Okinawa at an early date. I will send my best analysis of that situation, including the local attitudes, back to Washington, to the government there.

Demography is changing us as we are older societies, we're living longer. How the generations balance each other out, how that affects education and health care.

Any time the United States government turns over an American citizen, including military personnel, to the government of another country, it is in our nature to want to make sure that they receive the best treatment, the fairest treatment, and the most humane treatment.

The most difficult thing in any negotiation, almost, is making sure that you strip it of the emotion and deal with the facts. And there was a considerable challenge to that here and understandably so.

One of the things that has to be faced is the process of waiting to change the system, how much we have got to do to find out who we are, where we have come from and where we are going.

Strong people don't need strong leaders.

Give light and people will find the way.

So I let them be responsible for there particular areas. Then by the time it gets to me that means that there is a problem. I have my eyes open and I need to know something about every department but you don't want to micro manage any particular department.

Let them police themselves, and then it goes another step past them to my coaches and there a coach that is responsible for a different area and different category on the field.

I think we match up with anybody because our pitching. In a short series you run your big three out there or four out there. That generally is what wins a series - pitching and defense. If we can catch the ball and not give away any runs like we do sometimes.

Everyone has a budget, I don't care who you are. But they said if we are in a pennant race in the middle of the summer they are going to get some help with added payroll.

You can tell your uncle stuff that you could not tell your dad. That is kind of the role of an uncle. I feel very much like a father sometimes but sometimes I feel like a teammate.

When I look back now, it must have been like Paris was at the time of Le Sacre du Printemps.

What that book does for me is give me the tools in the same way that I had the tools when I learned the regular scales or the alphabet. If you give me the tools, the syntax, and the grammar, it still doesn't tell me how to write Ulysses.