I started out by believing God for a newer car than the one I was driving. I started out believing God for a nicer apartment than I had. Then I moved up.

Mayors could never get away with the kind of nonsense that goes on in Washington. In our world you either picked up the trash or you didn't. You either moved an abandoned car or you didn't. You either filled a pothole or you didn't. That's what we do every day. And we know how to get this stuff done.

When I first thought of the idea for 'Sweet Valley High ' I loved the idea of high school as microcosm of the real world. And what I really liked was how it moved things on from 'Sleeping Beauty'-esque romance novels where the girl had to wait for the hero. This would be girl-driven very different I decided - and indeed it is.

Instead it appears to be a particular mark of beauty that it is considered with tranquil satisfaction that it pleases if we also do not possess it and we are still far removed from demanding to possess it.

I read 'The Great Gatsby' in high school and was hypnotized by the beauty of the sentences and moved by the story about the irrevocability of lost love.

Maybe I'm old-fashioned. But I remember the beauty and thrill of being moved by Broadway musicals - particularly the endings of shows.

The beauty of a main title is that you establish your main theme and maybe a bit of your secondary theme. You plant the seed that you're going to go water later in the score. And so having that removed just made it so much more difficult.

What is important then is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect but a certain kind of temperament the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.

I studied architecture in New York. So really I was very moved like everyone else to try to contribute something that has that resonance and profundity of it means to all of us.

Yet for my part deeply as I am moved by the religious architecture of the Middle Ages I cannot honestly say that I ever felt the slightest emotion in any modern Gothic church.

Successful prime-time television of any genre produces some kind of emotional reaction in the viewers. There are a lot of different emotions to tap into. The emotion of the reward of discovery the feeling of righteous anger the feelings of pathos and sadness or sentimentality of being moved by something.

My siblings and I were friends with the boys who would become our stepbrothers - we grew up on the same street. I feel very special to have these amazing people in my life and if we hadn't all moved into this big house together I think I would have missed out on that because we would have drifted apart.

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved the inquisition might have let him alone.

Some of my foster families used to send me to the movies to get me out of the house and there I'd sit all day and way into the night. Up in front there with the screen so big a little kid all alone and I loved it. I loved anything that moved up there and I didn't miss anything that happened and there was no popcorn either.

My parents were really really cool about supporting what I wanted to do at a really young age. I think I was about 10 when I caught the bug. They would drive me down to New York if there were auditions. When I was 12 I did this show on Broadway called 'High Society ' so we moved to New York for the run of that.

As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well as it turned out I never wrote a great novel sadly and I never converted to Catholicism happily but I did do one thing he did. That is in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be.

I never took guitar lessons. I took classical piano lessons from the age of six when we lived in Holland. And when we moved to America it was just the typical thing except I was really good at it so was my brother.

I can feel the 60S looming. In my profession I've just moved along with my age. By thinking in decades rather than whether someone's 42 or 47 you can give yourself a whole 10 years to turn yourself around in.