Judge Roberts has assured me personally that he has a healthy respect for precedent and the hard-won rights of Americans.

Robert Kennedy was such an inspiring figure. His interest in politics seemed to come not from a desire for power but from a need to help our society live up to its ideals.

I have a lot of nice Italian winter clothes that make me look like a sophisticated Lebanese professor so my friend Robert and I go around pretending to be experts in Arabic politics. It doesn't work in the summer though. I don't have the right clothes.

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

One will never again look at a birch tree after the Robert Frost poem in exactly the same way.

I dabbled in things like Howlin' Wolf Cream and Led Zeppelin but when I heard Son House and Robert Johnson it blew my mind. It was something I'd been missing my whole life. That music made me discard everything else and just get down to the soul and honesty of the blues.

I'll always remember when I bumped into Good Morning America's Robin Roberts on a flight to my mother's funeral in 1994 and how kind she was during that difficult time.

It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway Van Gogh... Robert Schumann has been mentioned... Virginia Woolf Sylvia Plath... some of them with rather grim ends.

It is hard to see Judge Roberts as a judicial activist who would place ideological purity or a particular agenda above or ahead the need for thoughtful legal reasoning.

As a young man I went to Paris and soaked up many hours of film knowledge from Robert Hakim in my efforts to become a producer.