Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible as a contemporary poet.

Perhaps there is no greater issue facing contemporary women than the choices they must make about balancing home and work.

The history of Christianity therefore must be of concern to all who are interested in the record of man and particularly to all who seek to understand the contemporary human scene.

Minimalism seems closest to the sophisticated storytelling of movies. Movies have really educated contemporary audiences to be the most intelligent sophisticated audiences in history. We don't any longer need to have the relationship between one scene and the next explained. We will figure it out ourselves.

You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell how it really was.

As a nation we have the right to decide our own affairs to mould our own future. This does not pose any danger to anybody. Our nation is fully aware of the responsibility for its own fate in the complicated situation of the contemporary world.

Just as the Security Council was largely irrelevant to the great struggle of the last half of the twentieth century - freedom against Communism - so too it is largely on the sidelines in our contemporary struggles against international terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Maya Angelou the famous African American poet historian and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature believes a struggle only makes a person stronger.

With 'Bright Star' and with 'The Piano ' too I felt a kind of sadness about it being in such a different era because of my lack of experience with the era. And one of the ways I'd get over it is to remind myself that every film even if it's contemporary creates its own world.

So when I got to be about 13 or 14 I started listening - even though my parents music was way cool - to contemporary hard rock at that time which was Aerosmith Cheap Trick Black Sabbath AC/DC Ted Nugent and all that and that's just where I came from.