To design the future effectively you must first let go of your past.

But for me it is when a student has died. I find the death of a young person the most difficult and painful of times. To explain it to other young people to see a bright future snuffed out is just awful. I am haunted by those deaths.

Since fame is an illusion and death is in our future all we have is the next moment before we are swallowed into oblivion.

Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death the real and the imagined past and future the communicable and the incommunicable high and low cease to be perceived as contradictions.

And yet I suppose you mourn the loss or the death of what you thought your life was even if you find your life is better after. You mourn the future that you thought you'd planned.

A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past.

I was trying to make art that my son could look on in the future and would realize I was thinking about him very much during these times... that he can look and see my dad's thinking about me but to also embed in these things something that is bigger than all of us.

I'm not sure what the future holds but I do know that I'm going to be positive and not wake up feeling desperate. As my dad said 'Nic it is what it is it's not what it should have been not what it could have been it is what it is.'

Just two weeks ago millions of Iraqis defied the threats of terrorists and went to the polls to determine their own future. I congratulate the Iraqi people for the courage they've shown in making these elections so successful.

Such decisions will be far reaching and difficult. But you never lacked courage in the past. Your courage is now needed for the future.