"I didn't have to do the research I did for my historical novels, especially Empress Orchid, on which I labored to line up every account/record — investigative journalism, so to speak. The challenge about writing The Cooked Seed as a memoir was the issue of honesty, as how far and how deep was I willing to go to expose, examine, and dissect my life — that included doing autopsies on my flaws and personal failures."

"Faith, then, generically, is confidence in a personal being. Specifically, religious faith is confidence in God, in every respect and office in which He reveals Himself. As that love of which God is t…"

"Increasingly, politics is not about "who gets what, when, how" but about values, each of them considered to be absolute. Politics is about "the right to life"...It is about the environment. It is abou…"

"I can anticipate no greater calamity for the country than a dissolution of the Union. It would be an accumulation of all the evils we complain of, and I am willing to sacrifice everything but honor fo…"

"...we must go to the poets to see what they all meant by it; but the sum is an emotion — clear and strong as love and much clearer than logic,— whose charm lies in its unstable balance. The Transition…"