Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected unplanned by me.

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera theater music and dance are thriving all over the world but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.

I often find myself privately stewing about much British art thinking that except for their tremendous gardens that the English are not primarily visual artists and are in nearly unsurpassable ways literary.

Works of art often last forever or nearly so. But exhibitions themselves especially gallery exhibitions are like flowers they bloom and then they die then exist only as memories or pressed in magazines and books.

It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946 when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.

I could have been an architect but I don't think I'd have been very happy. Nearly all modern architecture is a silly game as far as I can see.

But on second thought after I decreed the state of emergency I came to the conclusion that that was impossible to achieve without bloodshed because the street protesters were full of anger and nearly out of control. This is why I thought we needed to find another way out.

I'd do pretty much anything to get back on stage. I'd like to develop a new musical. I nearly had a heart attack when I heard that they're developing John Waters' Cry-Baby because that is so amazing and super and wonderful and I wish that I could be involved. But it's not the right time and I understand that. But I hear things like that and I get that little tingle in my stomach.

So I won an Oscar. It's amazing. I've got that for the rest of my life for a performance I am proud of. It nearly killed me. I am really proud of the film. That's it moving on.

I think that age as a number is not nearly as important as health. You can be in poor health and be pretty miserable at 40 or 50. If you're in good health you can enjoy things into your 80s.

I nearly died of double bronchial pneumonia at the age of five.

I've never been more in love with anyone nearly half my age than I am today. I'd get married in a minute if I weren't still married to somebody else.

Nearly all the powerful people of this age are unbelievers the best of them in doubt and misery the most in plodding hesitation doing as well as they can what practical work lies at hand.