You may count on Mexico's support since your commitment to the noblest causes of mankind and your vast experience are and will be invaluable in enabling us together to achieve a better world.

If people choose to live their life in a way that does not confront the more troubling aspects of their experience that's fine if it works for them. But it will probably make them uncomfortable if they come up against somebody like me. So they just shouldn't! They shouldn't read my work!

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

My own life has in some ways been a decades-long tour of the sibling experience. I have full sibs I have half-sibs and for a time I had step-sibs.

Motherhood has completely changed me. It's just about like the most completely humbling experience that I've ever had. I think that it puts you in your place because it really forces you to address the issues that you claim to believe in and if you can't stand up to those principles when you're raising a child forget it.

Address these environmental issues and you will address every issue known to man. And we keep dabbling in things that aren't really that important in the long term.

Nature is not simply a technical or economical resource and human beings are not mere numbers. To suggest that one can somehow align all the squabbling institutions of science environmental management government and diplomacy in an alliance of convenience to regulate the global climate seems to me optimistic.

Population when unchecked goes on doubling itself every 25 years or increases in a geometrical ratio.

Politics are beautiful. They enable a community to live collectively with one another. It's not about stabbing each other in the back it's about enabling people to reach their dreams and pursue happiness.

I couldn't have foreseen all the good things that have followed my mother's death. The renewed energy the surprising sweetness of grief. The tenderness I feel for strangers on walkers. The deeper love I have for my siblings and friends. The desire to play the mandolin. The gift of a visitation.

Grumbling is the death of love.

After graduating from flares and platforms in the early 1970s I started drama school wearing a pair of khaki dungarees with one of my Dad's Army shirts accessorised by a cat's basket doubling as a handbag. Very Lady Gaga.

To go to hospitals and see people fight and overcome cystic fibrosis or cancer or any number of illnesses is to see courage that is humbling. And athletes constantly need to be humbled.

The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one in which information is given well-defined meaning better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.

It's been my policy to view the Internet not as an 'information highway ' but as an electronic asylum filled with babbling loonies.

I won't compare ants and people but ants give us a useful model of how single members of a community can become so organized that they end up resembling in effect one big collective brain. Our own exploding population and communication technology are leading us that way.

I remember being at Greenblatt's on Sunset and some guy just walked straight up to me and he had some bling on and whatever and said something about a party down in Malibu and asked if I would jump in his car and go to the party. All I could think was 'Who are you? I don't know you and I don't care about how good your car is.'

I was turning 20 during my first record. Those decade birthdays always kind of cause me it seems to reflect look back and then look forward. I just was closing this period of my life where I was living in a car and scrambling my whole life to then signing a six-record deal with Atlantic.

I'd get kicked out of buildings all day long people would rip up my business card in my face. It's a humbling business to be in. But I knew I could sell and I knew I wanted to sell something I had created. I cut the feet out of those pantyhose and I knew I was on to something. This was it.

The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.

My siblings are my best friends.

Having lots of siblings is like having built-in best friends.

'Untitled' is a time machine that can transport you to 1992 an edgy moment when the art world was crumbling money was scarce and artists like Tiravanija were in the nascent stages of combining Happenings performance art John Cage Joseph Beuys and the do-it-yourself ethos of punk. Meanwhile a new art world was coming into being.

What I dream of is an art of balance of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter - a soothing calming influence on the mind rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.