Every child is a thought in the mind of God, and our task is to recognize this thought and help it toward completion. Faith, sir, we are here today, and gone tomorrow. I did not make this a long film for its own sake. I wanted to make an entertaining film and offer it out there for those who want to see it. If word of mouth suggests there is an audience out there, hopefully their cinema will show it. If you do two versions of a film, they should be identical. With the same frames and settings. And it seems to me correct then, and I think it's correct now, that job one is get the planning done, make sure the buses are there. When that's done, it's completely appropriate to go around and tour around and look at the damage. I remember Berlin. Berlin to me was the star of the film. I loved for six months that we filmed there. No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it to anyone else. The miracle of light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slowly moving, the grass and water that is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades. It is a river of grass. It's definitely time to stop. We're getting too old. We both realised that the show wasn't as engaging as it used to be. We were starting to look a bit ridiculous. Flying back from New York, the flight attendant said 'God, I wished you were here yesterday, we had a stroke on the plane. I said, if I have a stroke on a plane, I hope the pretend doctor isn't the one on the plane. I want a real doctor. With radio, the listener absorbs everything. My path has not been determined. I shall have more experiences and pass many more milestones. The payoffs in showbiz seemed as random as a slot machine. There are moments when television systems are young and haven't formed properly, and there's room for lots of original stuff. Then things become more and more top-heavy with executives who are trying to guarantee the success of things. Our intention is to really explore this transition and, beyond that, explore the particular things that someone comes up against when they're gay or lesbian. And it wasn't until '84 when I was first asked to come to Sweden and do an album and concert tour. Bonfire of the Vanities: The lesson of that book is, never start believing your own press. I am a God. When I'm dead twenty-five years, people are going to begin to recognize me. One of the great problems with Americans is that - being a decent people - they assume that everyone else is equally decent. Creative people are very insecure people because they don't know whether people like them or are in awe of them. That insecurity always comes out. It makes them a better actor, I feel. There seems to be this sense among even well-meaning Americans that Africa is this black hole of murder and mutilation that can never be fixed, no matter what aid is brought in. Typically what happens is, somebody drags an idea from the past that worked in an old set of logics that they try to apply to the new one. And it doesn't work. In a still hot morning, the tide went out and didn't come back in. This was not a spectacular event. The sea did not roll up like a scroll, like the sky in Revelations. It quietly withdrew. I think one of the successes of Gladiator is how we manage to turn on a dime the character from one thing to another where you believe he is one thing and he is something very different. I've learned by hanging out in Hollywood, where I disagree politically with most people, that most people's hearts are in the right place, and the only thing we have to argue about is the way to solve the problems. A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education. I know a lot of people think I'm dumb. Well, at least I ain't no educated fool. What we are effectively doing, I say this to the young people of America whom my colleagues represent, is leaving our children and grandchildren the tab for fighting a war, letting them pay for the lion's share of it by simply adding it to the national debt. I think that those are the things that you can uniquely do with film that are difficult to do anywhere else: they can bring a picture to life, give it a natural and historical context and make you feel that everything else is suddenly credible. To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all. When I was crossing the border into Canada, they asked if I had any firearms with me. I said, "Well, what do you need?" I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.