If I'm on location on some island we usually get up at four in the morning to set up. By seven thirty we're on the beach working until noon then we rest. It's not exactly a vacation.

Four hours of makeup and then an hour to take it off. It's tiring. I go in I get picked up at two-thirty in the morning I get there at three. I wait four hours go through it ready to work at seven work all day long for twelve hours and get it taken off for an hours go home and go to sleep and do the same thing again.

I am a morning writer I am writing at eight-thirty in longhand and I keep at it until twelve-thirty when I go for a swim. Then I come back have lunch and read in the afternoon until I take my walk for the next day's writing.

I've been keeping a diary for thirty-three years and write in it every morning. Most of it's just whining but every so often there'll be something I can use later: a joke a description a quote. It's an invaluable aid when it comes to winning arguments. 'That's not what you said on February 3 1996 ' I'll say to someone.

To this day my mom's unsinkable spirit is an inspiration to me. For nearly thirty years she's worked at the Library of Congress. Everyone knows Sameha simply as 'Sami.' Along with 500 miles of shelved books her closest friendships are cataloged in that library. They are as much the value of work to my mom as is the work itself.

We cannot sacrifice innocent human life now for vague and exaggerated promises of medical treatments thirty of forty years from now. There are ways to pursue this technology and respect life at the same time.

A man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.

Within thirty years we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.

A human being has so many skins inside covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things but we don't know ourselves! Why thirty or forty skins or hides as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.

Sending Paris Hilton to jail for being the most loathed celeprosy lesion in the history of the species seems like a happening idea at first - forty-five days at Century Regional Detention Center is so the new thirty days at Promises Malibu! But it sets a dangerous precedent to jail celebs just because someone hates them.