I love being a father. I think there’s a great lie that we tell kids that pleasure creates happiness. Young people think: “Oh, if I get this, I’ll be happy.” But in a lot of ways it’s meeting your responsibilities that makes you happy. For me, I’ve just found that feeling like I’ve done a good job with the kids is a real source of happiness for me.

Boy, being a parent is a hard job, I think, because in parenting you want your kids to like you. Too much sometimes. It’s a hard line to find between doing what’s necessary to give them the tools to be good kids and make good decisions and all that, versus just completely not giving them a chance to accomplish anything because you do everything for them. I kind of feel like it’s okay if these kids go out and make a few mistakes, because they’re going to learn. The last ten years have been interesting, because I’m a stepparent to three kids, and I’m a father to two kids, an older and a younger. And it’s a real interesting dynamic.

My daughters are something, and they just surprise and enchant and impress me more and more every single day as they grow up. And so these days, when we talk, we talk as parent to child, but also we learn from them.

My greatest joy as a father is to see our children growing up and growing independent, and becoming brilliant ... But also every now and then needing me for something and remembering where I can fit into the world. And one of the great joys you realize is that you need them ... You work for their smile. You work for their joy.

Unfortunately, in the case of Iraq, I believe we could have done that through an inspection process. I was calling for a few months more to complete our work. We hadn’t seen indications of weapons of mass destruction. We hadn’t seen indications of nuclear weapons. ... Unfortunately, it didn’t work that way. There was faulty intelligence. There were lots of other considerations that made a decision to go to war tempting, to get rid of Saddam Hussein.

First of all, you learn to manage stress. You learn to live with stress. I mean, stress is there all the time. There’s no question about it. It’s in the morning. It’s at night. It’s at 3:00 in the morning, but you need to learn how to manage stress. Sometimes it’s more difficult than others, but you try to distract yourself. Whenever I have the chance, I like to go and have a round of golf. I have a passion for modern art. I have a passion for antique carpets, classical music. To me, these are distractions, and sometimes my wife, she think I’m obsessed with these little things, but I tell her it is my way of distracting myself from just constantly continuing about my work. But the stress is there. But sometimes, the euphoria you get from a sense of achievement in many ways compensates all the stress you had for a year or two.

For them, home is the world. For them, every human being is just one member of that large human family you have. ... if we have more children like mine, in my view, we will not have war.

I think that is the most important lesson you learn in life, that you have to be ready to make a compromise. You do not compromise your principles, but you have to be ready to compromise. You have to understand that you cannot get your way 100 percent. Life is too complicated. You are not an island, and you work in a social setting, and you need to understand that you work always — at the family level, at the society level — to work out the compromise that is perceived to be fair. You don’t get 100 percent of what you want, but at least you will get the basic minimum that you require.

My father was a lawyer. My mother was a homemaker. My father was president of the Egyptian Bar Association. He was involved very much during the Nasser era — which was one of the most repressive eras in Egyptian history — in fighting for democracy, fighting for human rights, and I think that to a lot of extent shaped my view as to what I wanted to do in the future. I wanted to have a world where people are free to express their views, to have freedom of worship, to have freedom from want, and I saw poverty in Egypt when I grew up. To me, freedom, in the larger sense — to be able to speak, to worship, free from want, free from fear — I think it was a key as to what I thought I would like to do when I grow up.

I have a lot of respect and admiration for President Carter. It was a delight when I got the Nobel Peace Prize to get a letter from him. It meant a lot to me, getting that letter from a man who is my idol in many ways. ... He always has the courage to express his views, his convictions. He doesn’t hesitate to run against the current. He has always had a moral certitude. He looks at the ethics and morality of his action, and that’s key. Whatever we do in life, whether privately or publicly, we need to have a compass. We need to be sure that what we do is not only good for us, but good for the people at large. That’s ethics. That’s morality. I think we need to always know that our work is not just good for us in the short term, but it’s morally correct. And when I talk about morality, I don’t talk about religion. I talk about a moral code, a moral value, which I think we all have, being honest, being fair, being correct. These are values I think we all share.