And my sister, whose name is Ruth Stapleton, was a famous evangelist. She wrote four or five books, and she would give lectures to 50,000 people at a time. She and I had a long walk in the woods on my farm, and she said, “Jimmy, quite often, when you have a blow to your pride and a horrible defeat, you can either give up, or you can look on it as a way that God opens to you to do different and even better things.”

Right, I went back as a mature student to art school, and I was advised to use my train journeys and commutes, or to just take time in the morning before work to sit down and write something. That was, I think, the beginnings of understanding what it meant to have a writing practice.

Her lesson all the time was “To them to whom much has been given, of them will much be required.”

If I were to give advice to young people, high-achieving young people for example, I'd have to say, don't neglect your family. Politics is important, sitting at the head table is glamorous. Traveling around the world, trying to do something for world peace was wonderful. But family and friends and faith are what really matter in life. And I know that. I see it so clearly now. And so, as they climb the ladder of achievement, I'd simply say, remember what Barbara Bush told those girls at Wellesley: "What happens in your house is more important than what happens in the White House." And it's true. It's so 100 percent true.

Having advanced well beyond what the French call "a certain age," I am often asked to convey to younger people helpful advice and counsel. So I will open these remarks with the best advice I ever received. The advice, which I have several times shared with others, was given to me by my mother-in-law on my wedding day. She had a prescription for a happy, enduring marriage: "It pays," she said, "it pays sometimes to be a little deaf."

I was fortunate to be born at the right time and to be in the right place when the Women’s Movement came alive. So many things were wrong with the way life was ordered in the ’70s. In many states, women didn’t serve on juries, to take just one example, and there were so many jobs that were off limits to women. People began to realize there was something wrong about that, and women should be free to aspire and achieve just as men are. So I had legal education, and I could use that education to help move this movement for change, for allowing women to realize their full potential, help move that along. So it was that ten years of my life that I devoted to litigating cases about — I don’t say women’s rights — I say the constitutional principle of the equal citizenship stature of men and women. I was tremendously fortunate to be able to participate in that movement for change.

I have followed that advice - with, I confess, occasional lapses not only at home, but in the places I have worked, even in relating to my colleagues at the Supreme Court. It is important to be a good listener if you are to work with others effectively, but it also pays, sometimes, to be a little deaf - for example, in my current position, when a colleague, academic commentator, or journalist writes that an opinion on which I labored endless hours, worrying over every word, is "sloppy," "smug," "strange," or "profoundly misguided." I am making none of those up.