A lot of Irish people perform. They perform in drawing rooms. They sing songs and they play piano.

I grew up in the Bronx where you would stay up late with your girlfriends just being silly in our bedrooms whatever. And I was always the clown.

Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.

Well I took a sabbatical. I walked away from shooting movies because I couldn't handle the travel. I'm a single parent. I had young kids and I found that keeping in touch with them from hotel rooms and airports wasn't working for me. So I stopped.

I take a very practical view of raising children. I put a sign in each of their rooms: 'Checkout Time is 18 years.'

In the depth of the near depression that he faced when he came in Barack Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress provided 'recovery funds' that literally kept our classrooms open. Two years ago these funds saved nearly 20 000 teacher and education jobs - just here in North Carolina.

We've heard from many teachers that they used episodes of Star Trek and concepts of Star Trek in their science classrooms in order to engage the students.

In science 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.

Inauthenticity is endemic in American politics today. The political backrooms where I spent much of my career were just as benighted as my personal life equally crowded with shadowy strangers and compromises truths I hoped to deny. I lived not in one closet but in many.