I think sometimes in life we want to ignore the problems of society and just think about the good. I believe in positive thinking and affirmative living I also think it's really important to remember all of our disenfranchised members of society.

With everything that's thrown at you whether it be problems at home problems at work - whatever - basically if you remain positive you can see your way out of that.

I think people in Botswana are pleased that my books paint a positive picture of their lives and portray the country as being very special. They've made a great success of their country and the people are fed up with the constant reporting of only the problems and poverty of the continent. They welcome something which puts the positive side.

When children are very young you read them books that are positive to help them go to sleep. But there comes a moment when they begin to understand the difficulties of the world. They know there are problems and the books they read should reflect that not gloss over them.

But you see our society is still trapped in this binary black/white logic and that has had some very positive implications for our generation. It's had some very negative ones as well and one of the negative ones is that it creates enormous identity problems for people who have one black ancestor and all white ancestors for example.

People meet in bars after work all over the world and talk about the great problems of life and death and the world and politics and they don't take themselves seriously. They can do nothing else except chat about these things in bars after work.

It's true that it's within the realm of cultural politics that young people tend to work through political issues which I think is good although it's not going to solve the problems.

London in the '70s was a pretty catastrophic dump I can tell you. We had every kind of industrial trouble we had severe energy problems we were under constant terrorist attack from Irish terrorist groups who started a bombing campaign in English cities politics were fantastically polarized between left and right.

I try not to spend too much time on partisan politics. Life's too short for that. I don't really believe that there have been many human problems solved by politics.

The lesson of the last year is this: foreign policy can't be managed through the politics of personality and our President would do well to take note of an observation John F. Kennedy made once he was in office - that all of the world's problems aren't his predecessor's fault.

I have to admit that I had a lot of problems with poetry.

If a poem is not memorable there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.

Peace congresses often start by dealing with some of the less important questions in excessive detail so at the end there is no time to discuss the most important problems.

In the Peace Corps the volunteer must be a fully developed mature person. He must not join to run abroad or escape problems.

Most of the approaches to peace between Israel and the Palestinians have been directed at trying to resolve the most complex problems like refugees and Jerusalem which is akin to building the pyramid from the top down.

Well I think everybody is frustrated by the finances of the U.N. and the inability to solve problems of war and peace.

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

Maybe it's like becoming one with the cigar. You lose yourself in it everything fades away: your worries your problems your thoughts. They fade into the smoke and the cigar and you are at peace.

You will find peace not by trying to escape your problems but by confronting them courageously. You will find peace not in denial but in victory.

Part of making any endeavour is that each one has its own special problems. It's the nature of the process.

I like movies that are about real people in real time with real problems.

And what I like about it is it makes me happy and I think it makes a lot of people happy to go to the movies and to not think about the problems of the day or the problems of tomorrow or the yesterday and just go on for the ride and have the fun of losing oneself in a fantasy.

Problems are not stop signs they are guidelines.

Expect problems and eat them for breakfast.