But when you're writing a script - for me anyway - you have to sort of create an enforced innocence. You have to divest yourself of worrying about a lot of stuff like what movies are hot what movies are not hot what the budget of this movie might be.

Where I live nobody who's fourteen is having sex and doing major drugs. And I think if you see it in the movies you may be influenced by it. I think it's so important to preserve your innocence.

The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.

I feel like I'm a much better person when I'm developing my imagination and my innocence and my vulnerability. I like that version of me better than the version where I'm just working on my analytical mind.

To the former child migrants who came to Australia from a home far away led to believe this land would be a new beginning when only to find it was not a beginning but an end an end of innocence - we apologise and we are sorry. To the mothers who lost the maternal right to love and care for their child - we apologise and we are sorry.

This is a generation weaned on Watergate and there is no presumption of innocence and no presumption of good intentions. Instead there is a presumption that without relentless scrutiny the government will misbehave.

Not even the brightest future can make up for the fact that no roads lead back to what came before - to the innocence of childhood or the first time we fell in love.

And that's the mission of The Innocence Project in New York is to exonerate people who have been wrongfully convicted and also work from a policy angle with Congress and state legislatures to prevent future wrongful convictions.

American movies and music deliver themes of freedom innocence and power that appeal to others - partly because America itself was put together out of a multiplicity of national traditions.

I suppose there's a melancholy tone at the back of the American mind a sense of something lost. And it's the lost world of Thomas Jefferson. It is the lost sense of innocence that we could live with a very minimal state with a vast sense of space in which to work out freedom.