Teen movies often have an unspoken underlying premise in which high school is seen as less serious than the adult world. But when your head is encased in that microcosm it's the most serious time of your life.

Sports is human life in microcosm.

Sports are a microcosm of society.

I like science fiction and physics things like that. Planets being sucked into black holes and the various vortexes that create possibility and what happens on the other side of the black hole. To me it's the microcosmic study of the macrocosmic universe in man and that's why I'm attracted to it.

My passion for gardening may strike some as selfish or merely an act of resignation in the face of overwhelming problems that beset the world. It is neither. I have found that each garden is just what Voltaire proposed in Candide: a microcosm of a just and beautiful society.

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.

There's a lot of thought in art. People get to talk about important things. There's a lot of sex you know in art. There's a lot of naked women and men and there's intrigue there's fakery. It's a real microcosm of the larger world.