you have no idea where your power, if you have any power, comes from and then, when it vanishes, you have no idea why it’s vanished.

So much of what I’ve learned, so much of what’s good in my life, was learned because something bad happened, or from making the wrong decision. Through bad decisions I learned how to find the ways to make the right ones.

The stroke cut out a lot of my external trips: my sports car and golf and my cello. This [ points to hand ] is just not much use with a cello, and I was—forced inside, and finding myself living in my inside. And that has made me be part of my soul. And that's perceiving my incarnation from here [ points to heart ], rather than from here [ points to head ]. And since this is words, I start from here, go over there.

Nobody wants to be told about the countless minor horrors and humiliations that become facts of “life” when your body turns from being a friend to being a foe: the boring switch from chronic constipation to its sudden dramatic opposite; the equally nasty double cross of feeling acute hunger while fearing even the scent of food; the absolute misery of gut-wringing nausea on an utterly empty stomach; or the pathetic discovery that hair loss extends to the disappearance of the follicles in your nostrils, and thus to the childish and irritating phenomenon of a permanently runny nose. Sorry, but you did ask … It’s no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don’t have a body, I am a body.

There are some things about being president that I still have difficulty doing. … For example, faking emotion. Because I feel it is an insult to the people I'm dealing with. For me to feign outrage, for example, feels to me like I'm not taking the American people seriously. I'm absolutely positive that I'm serving the American people better if I'm maintaining my authenticity. And that's an overused word. And these days people practice being authentic. But I'm at my best when I believe what I am saying.

If you ask me where has been the one area where I feel that I've been most frustrated and most stymied it is the fact that the United States of America is the one advanced nation on earth in which we do not have sufficient common-sense, gun-safety laws. Even in the face of repeated mass killings. … And for us not to be able to resolve that issue has been something that is distressing. But it is not something that I intend to stop working on in the remaining 18 months.

When I am on my deathbed, and I am thinking back on my life, I am absolutely certain that the thing I will be thinking about is holding my daughters' hands and taking them to the park. It will not be some speech I gave or some legislation that I passed. I am positive about that. And so if you keep that in mind, then you have to invest accordingly.

And finally, change requires more than just speaking out -- it requires listening, as well. In particular, it requires listening to those with whom you disagree, and being prepared to compromise. When I was a state senator, I helped pass Illinois's first racial profiling law, and one of the first laws in the nation requiring the videotaping of confessions in capital cases. And we were successful because, early on, I engaged law enforcement.

You'll see I wear only gray or blue suits. … I'm trying to pare down decisions. I don't want to make decisions about what I'm eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make. … You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can't be going through the day distracted by trivia.

I deeply regret not having learned a musical instrument. And I regret not having focused more on Spanish when I was studying it in school. I would love to be able to speak Spanish fluently and play an instrument.