All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

I auditioned for a solo in church and got it. I was about seven and I sang a song called 'Jesus I Heard You Had a Big House' and I remember people standing up at the end and me thinking 'Oh I think I'm going to like this.' That's how it all began. Sounds funny to say you got your start in church but I did.

What's funny about that is when I was writing Twilight just for myself and not thinking of it as a book I was not thinking about publishing and yet at the same time I was casting it in my head. Because when I read books I see them very visually.

Everything seems fine until you're about 40. Then something is definitely beginning to go wrong. And you look in the mirror with your old habit of thinking 'While I accept that everyone grows old and dies it's a funny thing but I'm an exception to that rule.'

I tend to play characters that I can infuse with certain kinds of humour. Even the baddest guy can be funny in his own particular way. I want the audience to engage with the character on some deeper level so that they leave the cinema still thinking about him.

I took 'P.S. I Love You' thinking it was going to be a little funny and I ended up crying every day on that film.

My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger.

There is a magnet in your heart that will attract true friends. That magnet is unselfishness thinking of others first when you learn to live for others they will live for you.

All my life Americans have been accustomed to thinking of theirs as 'the richest freest' country in the world. By most measurements it was long a contender for that honor and - among the larger countries if equal weight were given to wealth and indices of freedom - probably did deserve to be so described.

There's also a sense of freedom. I was so obsessed by this problem that I was thinking about if all the time - when I woke up in the morning when I went to sleep at night and that went on for eight years.