Anybody with a sense of humor is going to put on my album and laugh from beginning to end.

When you're young you want to make every kind of film: musicals Westerns horror. Slowly you begin to hear your own voice. I hope people receive what I do as small personal films that are somewhat contrarian about their main characters.

For me Barack Obama's election was a milestone of the most extraordinary kind. On the day he was elected I felt such hope in my heart. I thought we were seeing the beginning of a new era of equal opportunity across race and gender such as America had never known before.

Corporations consumers and citizens must begin acting in concert to create a powerful third pillar of social transformation if we hope to meet the social challenges we currently face with equal force. This begins with corporations that choose to alter how they practice capitalism in two ways to serve the greater good.

Hope of ill gain is the beginning of loss.

Hope begins in the dark the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.

If you start in the pit of despair with these profane awful things even a glimmer of hope or awareness is going to occur that's much brighter coming from this dark awful beginning.

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.

The relevance for 9/11 is that what 9/11 marked was the beginning of a struggle in which the terrorists come at us and strike us here on our home territory. And it's a global operation. It doesn't know national boundaries or national borders.

Censorship like charity should begin at home but unlike charity it should end there.