Being very, very honest, I've watched more Bill Clinton speeches than stand-up specials. Steve Jobs commencements. They're just great orators. I love people who boldly share their point of view.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I love graduation speeches. I have always loved them; I will always love them.
What I like about graduation speeches is that they're an opportunity for someone to make sense of their life and to impart that wisdom to someone else. It's like a sanctioned self-help moment.
I've never been so star struck in my life as when I met President Obama and Bill Clinton... and at the same time, no less! I'm not one to be at a loss for words, and that was a moment when I really was speechless. It was a big, big night.
My dad wasn't the best speaker like a Bill Clinton, or a Henry Kissinger, but he had character.
The presidency awed me, but presidents do not. Perhaps I have always expected too much of them, but I believe that when they reach the highest office in the land, they should live up to the greatest honor that can come to a person in American political life. Some have stood the test better than others.
In the time it takes to heat a TV dinner, Clinton had convinced me that he was the smartest person in the room and that I was the center of his attention. In the next 25 years, I would see countless others fall just as quickly to the Clinton Touch.
A conversation does not have to be scintillating in order to be memorable. I once met a president of the United States, and his second sentence to me was about knees.
Commencement speeches were invented largely in the belief that outgoing college students should never be released into the world until they have been properly sedated.
The most precious things in speech are pauses.
When I go into schools to speak, I am not giving a speech - it's really a one-man show. I call it 'didactic standup.'