I think having a vision can make someone an influential man. I'm not talking about acting or anything like that I'm talking about people I admire whether it's a writer or a musician or a sports figure or a politician whatever.

In a repressive society a writer can be deeply influential but in a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption the act of terror may be the only meaningful act.

Unfortunately our affluent society has also been an effluent society.

I could speak Spanish fluently growing up but I'm so out of practice and I have such a tremendous respect for songwriting in the Spanish language.

The major obstacle to a religious renewal is the intellectual classes who are highly influential and tend to view religion as primitive superstition. They believe that science has left atheism as the only respectable intellectual stance.

That was a time when I did love music I couldn't get enough of what was going on. Maybe it was Nirvana that brought me back. I guess it was a comfort because something that sounded so right - and non-commercial - had become so influential so immediately.

But you know if you live an affluent lifestyle there are all types of trappings that are there that you have to be cognizant of and you've got to try and communicate freely and gain understanding about and then keep moving on because you know sometimes lifestyles are chosen for us as opposed to us choosing them.

I want to see as many movies as I can and I covet a lot of weird influential movies.

I want to go to college to study journalism. I want to speak French fluently to travel. My mom was a journalist and it's in my blood.

It's like learning a language you can't speak a language fluently until you find out who you are in that language and that has as much to do with your body as it does with vocabulary and grammar.

As long as acquiring knowledge is the educational goal of schools educational opportunities will be limited as they are now to affluent families.

To me the Seventies were very inspirational and very influential... With my whole persona as Snoop Dogg as a person as a rapper. I just love the Seventies style the way all the players dressed nice you know kept their hair looking good drove sharp cars and they talked real slick.

The most influential factor in selling a home is always price. Don't build 'wiggle room' into the asking price. There's a price war out there and you have to win it from the get-go.

The most influential of all educational factors is the conversation in a child's home.

Ray Bradbury is for many reasons the most influential writer in my life. Throughout our long friendship Ray supplied not only his terrific stories but a grand model of what a writer could be should be and yet rarely is: brilliant and charming and accessible willing to tolerate and to teach happy to inspire but also to be inspired.

Without in any way minimising the economic and psychological blow that people experience when they lose their jobs the unemployed in affluent countries still have a safety net in the form of social security payments and usually free healthcare and free education for their children. They also have sanitation and safe drinking water.

I'd love to go to art school. I'd love to learn how to draw. I'd love to be fluent in Spanish. I'd like to be a brain surgeon.