I think when you're trying to produce a relationship on screen that doesn't actually exist perhaps sometimes there's a temptation to look at each other more to touch each other more.

When you think about it we actors are kind of prostitutes. We get paid to feign attraction and love. Other people are paying to watch us kissing someone touching someone doing things people in a normal monogamous relationship would never do with anyone who's not their partner. It's really kind of gross.

There is much to dislike about President Obama's approach to the financial crisis. But opposition it seems will have to come from somewhere other than conservatism. The party out of power is also a party out of touch.

We work hard on the show. We really believe in the show. It's an enormous privilege to work on a show that has the power to touch people's lives in such a positive way. The fan mail and the e-mail certainly reflect that.

People deal too much with the negative with what is wrong. Why not try and see positive things to just touch those things and make them bloom?

On the mountains mistakes are fatal. In politics mistakes are wounding emotionally but you recover. Personally wilderness helps me get back in touch with natural rhythms helps me reflect and in the process restore my creativity.

I call it people-to-people politics and that's what politics should be about reaching out and helping one another and touching one another about what we're going to do.

Well I think any time you delve into this sort of religion politics as you well know you're going to you know touch a few nerves. I wasn't - now - and this is the honest truth.

If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children things that touch your soul.

When you're looking that far out you're giving people their place in the universe it touches people. Science is often visual so it doesn't need translation. It's like poetry it touches you.

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.

Romance like a ghost escapes touching it is always where you are not not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time but it is poetry in the memory.

I have written some songs but I would really call what I've done poetry at the end of the day because I'll sit with my guitar for hours and hours on end for like a week and then I won't touch it for a month. I also just have no confidence. And you know what? I don't have time because I'd rather be doing other things like knitting.

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.

The true spirit of delight the exaltation the sense of being more than Man which is the touchstone of the highest excellence is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.

Pet me touch me love me that's what I get when I perform. That's when I'm really getting what I want.

I have felt cats rubbing their faces against mine and touching my cheek with claws carefully sheathed. These things to me are expressions of love.

And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers is always the first to be touch'd by the thorns.

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.

I met Prince William at a musical festival and he let me know he was a fan of my music. But the invitation to sing at his wedding reception came completely out of the blue. The fact that Kate and William knew the words to my songs was very touching.

That's why people listen to music or look at paintings. To get in touch with that wholeness.

Since I was a kid I've had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties Chicago blues of the Fifties West Coast music of the mid-Sixties - but I'd never really touched on dark Americana.

A few can touch the magic string and noisy fame is proud to win them: Alas for those that never sing but die with all their music in them!