In high school, I had a teacher who influenced me greatly, Miss Olive J. Williams, and she was versatile in music, and I wanted to be like her. She exposed me to the world of classical music. Before then, I had never heard classical music. She exposed me also to the great composers of the world, as well as black performers, which I didn’t know about at the time: Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, Roland Hayes and Dorothy Maynor and others.

My dad certainly, and coaches I had that I was very close to. They took a big part in my developing an interest in sports, actually. One has passed away I was very close to. His name was Bill Slybaum. He was my coach in junior high school for tennis and then he moved up the ladder academically and went to the high school about the time I got there. He was my high school coach in basketball. I became very close to him. Later on, when I came back after the service, I went to Compton Junior College near Los Angeles, and he was the junior college basketball coach. I was very close to him.

The closest to inspiration was my beloved fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Ponti, who I’m delighted lived long enough to get that book’s dedication. I exchanged Christmas cards with her for the rest of her life. She was a wonderful woman. I think the main way she inspired was by respecting students’ interests. She herself knew very little science. Science was not formally taught at all, as far as I can remember, at grade school level. She realized there were a group of us who were interested in science, so she would let us sit by ourselves in the back of the classroom once a week for a couple hours, and she got books for us and discussed science. So I suppose she was a very good model for good students.

Well, I am always trying to study, and when I came to New York, I was fortunate enough to meet Stanley Crouch, who is a writer. He had tremendous influence on me intellectually, because he had like a million books in his apartment, and a thousand records. So when I met him and saw all the records and books and stuff, and he didn’t graduate from college either, he just would voraciously read books. Every time I’d see him, he’d be talking about, “Hey, check this book out.” And I didn’t know any of that stuff, and I felt stupid when I was around him. And he knew more about the music than I did. I was 17 or 18, and he’d be saying “Well what about this record?” Him and also Albert Murray, who was Stanley Crouch’s mentor. Albert Murray has written the greatest books on jazz, Stomping the Blues, which is on blues, but it is one of the greatest books written about the poetics of jazz music, what the musician should be trying to do. And from having the opportunity to be around Stanley and Albert Murray, Stanley much more than Albert Murray, because I’m always too embarrassed to be around him, because he knows so much I always feel like I’m just in the way. But it really made me develop my intellectual curiosity, and Al Murray would give me books to read, and tell me where to go, and tell me about an important exhibit in town, “Go check this out.” I talk to Stanley almost every day. We never talk about just anything, it’s always something definite: “Did you check out this new Romare Bearden book that they put out?” He keeps me on a certain level of intellectual engagement. And always understand that you have to constantly work to develop your intellect, and just increase your curiosity.

If I had to make the welfare decision again tomorrow, I’d sign it again tomorrow. We had a 60 percent reduction in the welfare rolls. We had an enormous percentage of poor people move into the workforce, start middle-class lifestyles, and when we had a brief tech recession of six months in 2001, after I left office, people who had moved from welfare to work were less likely to be laid off than the general working population. So I would do it again.

Yeah, there were a lot of brave people who stood up. Then, you know, it cost Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers and the three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and Viola Liuzza and a lot of the others their lives, but they were on the right side of history, and they believed if they made this sacrifice that it would work out. And whenever I get discouraged about everything they stood against rising up again, I realize there just are no public, or permanent, victories. You have to keep fighting for freedom.

We have all these interesting challenges now. No one knows whether automation and robotics, nanotechnology, will kill more jobs than it creates. If it does, that presents a serious problem. What are we going to do? Have a few of us work to support everybody else, or shorten the workweek for everybody? If so, how do we get from here to there? No one knows yet how we’re going to stop cyber terrorism from wrecking honest discourse in democracy and maybe putting our very lives at risk.

Yeah. I’m the luckiest person who ever lived, you know? I worked hard, like a demon. Some would say too hard from time to time, and I over-married, and I had a magnificent child. I have been incredibly fortunate, but I had the American Dream, and it didn’t matter to anybody that nobody in my family had ever been to college.

Oh, yeah. I spent a lot of time in the public library. When we moved I was seven years old, and I got a library card, and I used to go to the library all the time, and I loved all the, you know, standard children’s novels. I love those Biblical epics, but my favorite books when I was a child were books about Native Americans: tribal leaders; Osceola, who brought the alphabet to the Seminoles; Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce; and the standard ones that were heroes in all the Western movies. But I was fascinated. The Cherokee had moved across my state on the Trail of Tears when they were expelled from the East and then moved over to the reservation lands. I became fascinated with what happened to the Native Americans and the struggle that many were undertaking then — and they still try to preserve their traditions and their way of life, their ties to the land, and still provide education and participate in the life of the country. I was interested in it then. I’m interested in it now. The Native Americans in our country who don’t have casinos on their tribal lands still have the lowest per capita income of any ethnic group in America. It’s a disgrace, and when I became president I was the first president since James Monroe in the 1820s to invite all the tribal leaders to the White House, and it was fascinating. Some of the ones who came from lands that had casinos flew in on their private jets. A lot of the others had to pass the hat in the reservation to raise enough money to pay for a plane ticket, and they all came, and we began to meet, and I learned a lot from them.

I do think my mother had a lot to do with that. I mean, after all, you know her — it was not near as bad as having your husband die in a car wreck after — he survives World War II. They had a great life planned, and he gets killed in a car wreck, not because of a concussion, but because in a fluke, the tire blows out on his car. He’s thrown out of the car. He lands in a ditch in a field, and the ditch is full of water, and he can’t get out of the ditch before he drowns. There’s — it made it look a little whiny for me to be all bent out of shape about losing an election, and I realized that it was a weird deal. It was 1980. It was Reagan’s election. It was a period not unlike now, widespread resentment over the stagnant economy, the Iran hostage crisis, and I bet I had a hundred people coming to — I’m not exaggerating — coming to me and saying, “God, Bill, I didn’t know you were going to lose. I just voted against you to because I didn’t like some of the things you’d done.” And I remember once — one of the funniest things that ever happened to me. I was driving over to see my mother. I lived in Little Rock, and she lived in Hot Springs 50 miles away, and in the middle of the trip was a little country store owned by a guy who ran the elections in that area and was real smart, so I went in to get a Coke, and started talking to him. And this little boy came up to me in overalls, and he said, “You’re Bill Clinton, aren’t you?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “I helped to beat you. I cost you 11 votes, and it was no accident.” I said, “You did?” He said, “Yeah.” He said, “It was me, my wife, our two boys and their wives, and five of my friends. We just decked you.” I said, “Why’d you do it?” He said, “I had to because you raised my car tax. The car license.” And so we’re standing on the interstate. I said, “Look over there. You remember when I was governor? That highway broke wide open, and even big trucks were off in the ditch, and I had to send the National Guard down here to clean it up, and we had to fix it.” He said, “Yeah, I remember. I don’t care. I still didn’t want to pay it.” So I was laughing at the guy, and I said, “Let me ask you something.” I said, “If I ever ran again, would you vote for me?” He said, “Absolutely.” I said, “You would?” He said, “Sure. We’re even now.” And I went — and there were no cell phones, so I had a dime. I went and put it in the payphone, and I called Hillary, and I said, “You know, I’m not dead yet. We might have to run again.