Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.
I was ecstatic they re-named 'French Fries' as 'Freedom Fries'. Grown men and women in positions of power in the U.S. government showing themselves as idiots.
I have never described the time I was in Doctor Who as anything except a kind of ecstatic success but all the rest has been rather a muddle and a disappointment. Compared to Doctor Who it has been an outrageous failure really - it's so boring.
The soul should always stand ajar ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.
But I honestly don't read critics. My dad reads absolutely everything ever written about me. He calls me up to read ecstatic reviews but I always insist that I can't hear them. If you give value to the good reviews you have to give value to the criticism.
My nominee for Best Picture of the year - maybe the best picture ever because it's essentially made up of and is an ecstatic love letter to all other movies - is Christian Marclay's endlessly enticing must-see masterpiece 'The Clock.'
People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course that's both liberating and alarming.
If Germany thanks to Hitler and his successors were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe.