Poor David Hume is dying fast but with more real cheerfulness and good humor and with more real resignation to the necessary course of things than any whining Christian ever dyed with pretended resignation to the will of God.

People tend to overstate my resilience but of course I hope they're right.

We hope President Obama will now respect the will of the people change course and commit to making the changes they are demanding. To the extent he is willing to do this we are ready to work with him.

What can you do if a part of it is uphill? You can't work out another route. You've just got to run the one they give you. But they tell me London is a nice course. Even the cobbles I hope are not very much of a problem for me.

I hope that Facebook and other Internet technologies were able to help people just like we hope that we help them communicate and organize and do whatever they want to every single day but I don't pretend that if Facebook didn't exist that this wouldn't even be possible. Of course it would have.

Having a sense of purpose is having a sense of self. A course to plot is a destination to hope for.

Theater is of course a reflection of life. Maybe we have to improve life before we can hope to improve theater.

But inspiration? - That's when you come home from abroad and are asked: Well have you found inspiration? - and fortunately you haven't. But the impressions sink in of course and may emerge later: None of us has invented the house that was done many thousands of years ago.

You know the sad thing of post-9/11 which was of course horrific was that the city in which I felt completely at home for two decades suddenly people like us - brown people - were looked at as the 'Others.'

I got a scholarship to Seattle University and I was writing arrangements for singers and everybody. But the music course was too dry and I really wanted to get away from home.