In the spring of 2007, Israeli intelligence brought to Washington proof that the Assad regime in Syria was building a nuclear reactor along the Euphrates - with North Korean help. This reactor was a copy of the Yongbyon reactor the North Koreans had built, and was part of a Syrian nuclear weapons program.

As the Palestinian leadership never seems to pay any penalty for its words, America's seriousness about the peace process is in doubt.

Enlightened despots are mythical creatures; real despots seem more interested in stealing money or installing their sons after them.

I grew up in Queens, in New York City, in a middle class Jewish family. My mother was a public school teacher, my father was a lawyer. They were Democrats - kind of middle-of-the-road democrats.

A barn with cattle and horses is the place to begin Christmas; after all, that's where the original event happened, and that same smell was the first air that the Christ Child breathed.

The sharpest memory of our old-fashioned Christmas eve is my mother's hand making sure I was settled in bed.

Every Christmas should begin with the sound of bells, and when I was a child mine always did. But they were sleigh bells, not church bells, for we lived in a part of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where there were no churches.

All families had their special Christmas food. Ours was called Dutch Bread, made from a dough halfway between bread and cake, stuffed with citron and every sort of nut from the farm - hazel, black walnut, hickory, butternut.

I began to write poetry in high school, and would ride miles over sandy roads in the fine hills around Cedar Rapids, repeating the lines over and over until I had them right, making some of the rhythm of the horse help.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.

All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the un-visionary language of farm, city, and love.

The perfection of art is to conceal art.

Fear of the future is worse than one's present fortune.

In almost everything, experience is more valuable than precept.

God, that all-powerful Creator of nature and architect of the world, has impressed man with no character so proper to distinguish him from other animals, as by the faculty of speech.

When defeat is inevitable, it is wisest to yield.

Nothing is more dangerous to men than a sudden change of fortune.

It is worth while too to warn the teacher that undue severity in correcting faults is liable at times to discourage a boy's mind from effort.

Men, even when alone, lighten their labors by song, however rude it may be.

To my mind the boy who gives least promise is one in whom the critical faculty develops in advance of the imagination.

Our minds are like our stomaches; they are whetted by the change of their food, and variety supplies both with fresh appetite.

From the leg lamp to Ralphie's tongue getting stuck on a frozen pole to that BB-gun incident, 'A Christmas Story' has left its mark on all our brains, so much so that it sometimes feels like this story is our own.

Sometimes when people start dating a hot piece, they take on some of their boo's characteristics unintentionally.

Who can forget the awesome scene in 'Independence Day' when the White House gets blown up by aliens? Sure, it looks cheesy now, but back in 1994, it was incredible.

I found that I was just hopeless at school. It was just a total bore. First, I passed in art and English, and then just art. Then I passed out.

The future is unwritten.

If you ain't thinkin' about man and God and law, then you ain't thinkin' about nothin'.

Authority is supposedly grounded in wisdom, but I could see from a very early age that authority was only a system of control. And it didn't have any inherent wisdom. I quickly realized that you either became a power or you were crushed.

For a Jewish guy, I've recorded a lot of Christmas albums.

First of all, I've been having a wonderful run of luck with cover albums, songs I didn't write. I had five pop cover albums and two Christmas albums, and they were all very successful.

These days, with 'American Idol' and all the other reality shows, young people become famous overnight, and that can be very difficult to handle, the way photographers follow you around and study your every move.

Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.

Boston has carried the practice of hypocrisy to the n-th degree of refinement, grace, and failure.

The commercial spirit is the spirit of profit, not patriotism; of credit, not honor; of individual gain, not national prosperity; of trade and dickering, not principle.

Christmas Day itself hasn't always been great. My parents went abroad when I was very young, and I went to boarding school. We had a few Christmases before that - I remember a big sack of presents and Mummy cooking goose.

My favourite time of year is two weeks before Christmas when everybody's up for it - you're having lunches with people, drinking Cosmopolitans, and getting ready for something exciting!

I think that the romantic suspense that you used to get between people like Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant is much sexier than seeing people taking their clothes off and getting into bed, which is voyeurism.

I drew a lot. I always had sketchbooks. My parents were really great about any gift-giving holiday - birthdays, Hanukkah, Christmas - it was always art supplies for my brother and I.

I find the most normal things about famous people to be the most fascinating.

I'm so thankful for that struggling period. That time is really great where you have no idea what's going to happen.

I really, really like interior design. I grew up in a really old house outside of Philly that was built in 1821. My mom is really into antiques, and my dad is very mid-century. They're not together anymore, so in the middle of growing up, I, all of the sudden, had two houses that were very different but really well done in each of their own ways.

What I love about comedy is that it's unquestionably working. There are varying degrees of that, where there's something that makes you smile and is funny versus something that makes you hysterically laugh.

'I am a bad mother.' Every Christmas, this is what I think because the holiday season fills me with such anxiety. I'm sure that other mothers are happily baking cookies, decorating trees, and finding perfect gifts for everyone.

One of the best Christmas presents I ever got was the globe that I now keep right beside my desk.

I was a writer first, and knew I'd be a storyteller at age seven. But since my parents are very practical, they urged me to go into a profession that would be far more secure, so I went to medical school.

My dad was Chinese-American and very conservative when it came to his family's futures. He said if I wanted to have a secure job, I should go into science. So I did what Dad said and went to medical school, but the writing bug never left me.

I met my husband, Jacob, in medical school. We married and went to live in Hawaii where his family lived. It was very beautiful, but I wasn't used to being on an island and needed wide open spaces. Eventually we moved to Maine, New England.

I think of myself as a fairly logical, scientific and somewhat reserved person. Maura Isles, the Boston medical examiner who appears in five of my books, is me. Almost everything I use in describing her, from her taste in wine to her biographical data, is taken from my own family. Except I don't have a serial killer as a mother!

I think what medical training does is it gives you the language, the tools to look up facts. I think medical training gives you a sense of how to approach a problem, how to look at symptoms and go down the list of what it might be.