"I often hear people say that a person suffering from Alzheimer's is not the person they knew. I wonder to myself - Who are they then?"

“As I was not a good singer - I have started to sing. And because no one could write an appropriate song for me - I started to write songs by myself.”

“Unless things change radically, President Bush will be the first President since Herbert Hoover to have presided over a net loss of jobs during his administration.”

“The big compliment came from the beer drinkers who didn't know me. They wouldn't drink or move when I sang. If they had their glasses in mid-air, the glasses wouldn't come down.”

“Never trust a politician, Todd. They have no fixed center, so you can never believe them.”

“As the eldest son of an Alabama sharecropper family, I was constantly troubled by a collage of North American southern behaviors and notions in reference to the inhumanity of people. There were questions that I did not know how to ask but could, in my young, unsophisticated way, articulate a series of answers.”

“Uh, what are you doing?” “Nothing much. Just erasing all of Calinda’s good grades and replacing them with incompletes. Eventually, the administrators will figure out what happened, but I’m making it look like a computer error. Still, I imagine she’ll get some nasty lectures from her profs and parents in the meantime.”

“Sometimes he would advise me to read poetry, and would send me in his letters quantities of verses and whole poems, which he wrote from memory. 'Read poetry,' he wrote: 'poetry makes men better.' How often, in my later life, I realized the truth of this remark of his! Read poetry: it makes men better.”

“Bilingualism for the individual is fine, but not for a country.”