There are characters in movies who I call 'film characters.' They don't exist in real life. They exist to play out a scenario. They can be in fantastic films but they are not real characters what happens to them is not lifelike.

We can now have action movies with two stars where one might be African American and one might be Asian American. One of them doesn't have to be white and the other one doesn't have to be the ethnic sidekick. We're way over that. And I think it's happening in society too.

I realized this is what God has dealt me and I should be thankful considering all that's happened to me in my life but MS caused the movies to stop - stop dead - and I miss it.

Things do not happen. Things are made to happen.

I have been wounded like this since about half past eight this morning and I will tell you how it happened.

In Rio Bravo when Duke makes love to Feathers the scene dissolves to the next morning where we see him putting on his vest and almost humming. It was subtle but you knew what happened. Give me a towel and some blankets any day!

When I run in the morning my body spends the first 20 minutes trying to figure out what's happening to it.

This morning I was laughing at my cat who was running up the stairs and slipped and pretended like it didn't happen.

You don't learn style from watching people on a runway. Fashion happens every morning when you wake up.

Sometimes I lose a whole morning waiting on journalists and other people who look for me. But I always find some time for reading talking to my friends and feeling what is happening in this world.

What I had said in the morning was that this is what we know has happened but there has been no significant off-site release. Only to find out moments later that in fact there had been an off-site release. I still haven't gotten over that.

Now I know that that is just the phenomena of eating this way. Most all of my letters say I hit a plateau and then one morning I woke up and the melt had happened.

The result was that if it happened to clear off after a cloudy evening I frequently arose from my bed at any hour of the night or morning and walked two miles to the observatory to make some observation included in the programme.

As one gets older it happens that in the morning one fails to remember the airplane trip to be taken in a few hours or the lecture scheduled for the afternoon.

The worst part about pregnancy would definitely have to be my nausea. I don't know why it's just called morning sickness because morning sickness never just happened in the morning for me and it's not happening just in the morning for my sister.

The question is the morning after. What sort of Iraq do we wake up to after the bombing? What happens in the region? What impact could it have? These are questions leaders I have spoken to have posed.

Most of the top actors and actresses may be working in ten or twelve films at the same time so they will give one director two hours and maybe shoot in Bombay in the morning and Madras in the evening. It happens.

I kind of woke up one morning and was like 'Oh I see what's happening I get everything'. I woke up and was like 'I get it I'm a product.'

What is news? It's hard to quantify. Certainly news has changed completely and the morning shows are not really designed to bring you the news except to tell you what happened overnight and the rest of it is a kind of magazine mentality - a little bit of this a little bit of that. It's harder to be an educated and informed citizen.

One thing that happens when you're pregnant is that as your stomach starts to stretch. It itches! So I have to keep my belly really lubricated. Every morning there's a buttering ceremony after I get out of the shower. It's really like basting a turkey with body butter.

I'll never forget one morning I walked in and I had a hell of a bruise - it had been a difficult night the night before - and a client said to me 'Good God Vidal what happened to your face?' And I said 'Oh nothing madam I just fell over a hairpin.'

I have never been bored an hour in my life. I get up every morning wondering what new strange glamorous thing is going to happen and it happens at fairly regular intervals.

Let me tell you it is still morning in America. It just happens to be kind of a head pounding hung over for four hours in America - and it's shaping up to be a nasty day but its still morning in America.

Most of the time I spend when I get up in the morning is trying to figure out what is going to happen.