“The personal things should be left out of platforms at conventions. You can argue yourself blue in the face, and you’re not going to change each other’s minds. It’s a waste of your time and my time.”

I think togetherness is a very important ingredient to family life.

I hate abortions, but just could not make that choice for someone else.

I may be the only mother in America who knows exactly what their child is up to all the time.

I love talking to people, but what I really love is to feel you’re doing something instead of sitting home and twiddling your thumbs.

Family and friends and faith are the most important things in your life and you should be building friendships.

I don’t like attacking.

I’m not going to jump out of airplanes or anything like someone else I know.

Nancy Reagan was a perfectionist, and I am not.

You may think the president is all-powerful, but he is not. He needs a lot of guidance from the Lord.

Giving frees us from the familiar territory of our own needs by opening our mind to the unexplained worlds occupied by the needs of others.

I mean you can learn how to build a bullet or build a gun or build a bomb on the Internet.

And who knows? Somewhere out in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow in my footsteps, and preside over the White House as the President’s spouse. I wish him well!

I’m worried about parents who aren’t parenting.

At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a friend, a child, or a parent.

You have to love your children unselfishly. That’s hard. But it’s the only way.

I’m a little old-fashioned.

So my wife’s experience is just like that of anybody else whose husband goes away to a blue collar job and comes home bruised and dirty and often proud of the work that they’re doing.

I’m a doofus from the Valley, a blue-collar guy.

I’d like to be a geneticist to be honest, but there are limits to what I can do now. For my dream to come true I’d have to be 20 years old again, heading off to a blue chip university.

That leaves me with a twisted view of the whole wide world as I know it… And I guess I got no choice but to be a poet.

They asked me, How did you learn to sing the blues like that? How did you learn to sing that heavy? I just opened my mouth and that’s what I sounded like.

People, whether they know it or not, like their blues singers miserable. They like their blues singers to die afterwards.

Audiences like their blues singers to be miserable.

Men are like pillow-cases. The colour of one may be red, that of another blue, and that of the third black; but all contain the same cotton within.