Aside from sales, the letters from readers have been primarily positive. When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, "I used everything you gave me". I'm inspired by people who keep on rolling, no matter their age. Thankfully, beauty is easier to remove than apply, and a swipe of demaquillage in the right direction and you are you once again. I just didn't work that much while the kids were growing up. Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature. Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes... but no plans. I try to manage my time to conserve energy. The people of the world genuinely want peace. Some day the leaders of the world are going to have to give in and give, it to them. There's kind of a cool feel that happens every now and then. I guess that feel is the thing that makes the score its own score. But, I don't know exactly what that is. So, it's hard for me to answer that question. Without the brave efforts of all the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines and their families, this Nation, along with our allies around the world, would not stand so boldly, shine so brightly and live so freely. If the arts are held up solely as a means of social insight, fantasy is denied the chance to be commonplace and reality the chance to be exotic. The news is the one thing the networks can point to with pride. Everything else they do is crap, and they know it. Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium. Sometimes the best gain is to lose. Men and women have roles - their roles are different, but their rights are equal. A large part of my life revolves around my dad. Sometimes, I even feel a strong sense of connection, something very tangible when I learn something new in the martial arts. Show me someone who doesn't have some sort of experience that they would be uncomfortable for people to know about and I'll show you a dullard. It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved. In dedicating his estate to the honoring of endeavors that benefit mankind, Alfred Nobel expressed a lifelong concern that is even more timely in 1972 than it was in his lifetime. So, it looks like we rebuild the village and blow it apart a few more times. If you mess up your children, nothing else you do really matters. Make health care a right, not a privilege. We should go forward in courts and Congress with investigations into post-9/11 interrogations and the decisions leading to them. Once you find you can't walk as far and as fast as you were able, life becomes more complicated. I stay way from that area, and there's only so many songs you can write about love, sex and death. I will never master this craft. Orchestras are very, very forthcoming with me. You have within you right now, everything you need to deal with whatever the world can throw at you. I have a brother who's a psychologist. He says three-quarters of the world are born feeling that they will be affected by the world; one quarter are born knowing that they will affect the world. The people of the future will say, meat-eaters in disgust and regard us in the same way that we regard cannibals and cannibalism.