I used to get 15-20 bunt hits a season. Now, I'm down to five or six. Infielders still play me in, but I'm always looking if the opportunity is there.
The fellows that I played with encouraged me to bunt and beat the ball out. I was anxious to make good and did as I was told. When I came to Brooklyn, I adopted an altogether different style of hitting. I stood flat-footed at the plate and slugged. That was my natural style.
I have seen such an immense change from the total repression and criminality of homosexuality in my lifetime. It does make me much more buoyant and optimistic about the future. If that change can occur in that time there's hope for many other changes.
My mom was funny and nutty. I suppose she had to be to survive raising 10 kids. To cope and keep a cap on things, she kept us buoyant and harmonious. She wouldn't let us express anger, which later on landed me in therapy but also made it easier for me to play laid-back, measured roles.
All my stepchildren carried the burden of my fame. Sometimes they would read terrible things about me, and I'd worry about whether it would hurt them. I would tell them: 'Don't hide these things from me. I'd rather you ask me these things straight out, and I'll answer all your questions.'
I'm black, I don't feel burdened by it and I don't think it's a huge responsibility. It's part of who I am. It does not define me.
Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty.
The Kurt thing has burdened me so much.
Jesus asks me to go to him when I am overburdened. He did not promise to take away those burdens, for I must carry mine as he carried his.
I was living an extremely burdensome life, because every time I prayed, I became more clearly aware of my faults. On the one hand, God was calling me. On the other, I was following the way of the world. Doing what God wanted made me happy; but I felt bound by the things of this world.
Let me start by emphasizing that I am open to efforts to expedite environmental procedures for true emergencies or in other clear cases where current laws are needlessly burdensome.
There are over 170,000 pages of regulations in Washington, D.C. I want to streamline the rules in the federal government to basically allow businesses to grow without fear of burdensome federal regulations. That's a passion to me, regulatory reform.
I don't think the government is out to get me or help someone else get me but it wouldn't surprise me if they were out to sell me something or help someone else sell me something. I mean, why else would the Census Bureau want to know my telephone number?
The first Friday of every month is what we call Numbers Day - it's the day that the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the monthly jobs report. We have a ritual at the Labor Department - at 8 A.M., we gather around a table in my office, and the commissioner of labor statistics briefs me and the department's senior leadership on the numbers.
I first met Kim Dae Jung when he was a Korean dissident whose life was threatened by the military regime ruling in Seoul. I was Ronald Reagan's Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, and Kim was directed to me because the East Asia Bureau at the State Department had long shunned him.
Religion, to me, is a bureaucracy between man and God that I don't need.
To me, the most powerful people in this country, politically, are mayors. If you took all the mayors of the 25 biggest cities and you got them together, you could do more on that level than you ever could through the bureaucracy in Washington.
I always thought of myself as a kind of literary bureaucrat. And that was never going to be enough for me.
The idea was never for me to be a career bureaucrat or career technocrat; it was more about where I could implement ideas and reform programs.
It saddens me when public officials and bureaucrats are criticized for ulterior motives, none of which I have ever found in a government bureaucrat, or when someone personalizes disagreements.
