I was just then going through a healthy reaction from the orthodoxy of my youth religion had become for me not so much a possession as an obsession which I was trying to throw off and this iconoclastic tale of an imaginary tribe was the result.

Writing is my obsession my passion. My relationship with it is one of the most complex and agonizing and richly vexing that I have in my life.

My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass for new things to happen to us we want to hold on to certain moments we don't want our lives to end.

What I'm trying to do is find either existing properties or come up with properties or angles or stories which will create music drama. It's my obsession and most of all I would like to remain working in theatre. I think it's very much alive.

Since I was a kid I've had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties Chicago blues of the Fifties West Coast music of the mid-Sixties - but I'd never really touched on dark Americana.

I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist every morning at the time of his visit made me want to hang myself realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.

My hope is that people will be repulsed by the character's complete lack of ethics and obsession with consumerism - that's what I was saying about the difference between the character's message and the film's message.

Our culture's obsession with vintage objects has rendered us unable to separate history from nostalgia. People want heart. They want a chaser of emotion with their aesthetics.

When the Nobel award came my way it also gave me an opportunity to do something immediate and practical about my old obsessions including literacy basic health care and gender equity aimed specifically at India and Bangladesh.

I learn from thinking about the future what hasn't been done yet. That's kind of my constant obsession.