This is the strangest life I've ever known.

What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head and is known to none but himself.

I've never gone to acting school and I never will so I'm learning about the business from the people who are in the business. It doesn't seem like I work at all. And the unknown is always exciting.

The Company of Wolves is about how society teaches young women to look at themselves and what to be afraid of. It's about a girl learning that the world of sensuality and the unknown is not to be feared that it's worth getting your teeth into.

Contrary to current cynicism about past golden ages the abstraction known as 'the intelligent layperson' does exist - in the form of millions of folks with a passionate commitment to continuous learning.

Spending time at the Federal Reserve was a good learning opportunity for me. It helped me to understand economic philosophies and polices that I had not previously known about.

So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama learning the literature on evolution what was known about it biologically just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular scientific view of the world.

Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable.

The biggest novelty of 2013 will be new leadership in China. Very little is known about the views of the new leaders - who will rule the country for ten years. But we do know they're the first generation of Chinese leaders who have spent the majority of their lives in a China 'opening up' to the rest of the world.

For the things of this world cannot be made known without a knowledge of mathematics.