I'm a person that carries everything that happened to me in my past with me into the future. I refuse to let it make me bitter. I still completely believe in love and I remain open to anything that will happen to me.

And I like to keep whatever is mine remaining that way. It's a funny little game to play and it's a slippery slope. I always say to myself I'm never going to give anything away because there's never any point or benefit for me.

I came to Venice for the first time in 1968 and was lucky enough to make the acquaintanceship and then the friendship of two Venetians Roberta and Franco who remain my best friends here after almost 50 years.

The ideal friendship is to feel as one while remaining two.

Many a person has held close throughout their entire lives two friends that always remained strange to one another because one of them attracted by virtue of similarity the other by difference.

Most importantly nothing has happened to change my conviction that freedom and the love of liberty remain the essential defining attributes of our national character as a people.

To her audience Janis Joplin has remained a symbol artifact and reminder of late Sixties youth culture. Her popularity never derived from her musical ability but from her capacity to link her fantasies of freedom and immortality with ours.

I have always been a firm believer in the longstanding American principle of having the right to bear arms and I will remain committed to see that this freedom is not infringed upon revoked or limited in any way.

I remain optimistic. What we've seen in Europe and the rest of the world is that freedom has a much stronger attraction than radical fundamentalism.

The message of Passover remains as powerful as ever. Freedom is won not on the battlefield but in the classroom and the home. Teach your children the history of freedom if you want them never to lose it.