The other side of it is that despite all that people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.

My grandmother was a kind of Scarsdale New York society woman best known in her day as the author of the 1959 book 'Growing Your Own Way: An Informal Guide for Teen-Agers' - this despite being a person whose parenting style made Joan Crawford's wire hangers look like pool noodles.

My mom died of cancer when I was really young. I'm not someone who tries to work out their own stuff with a role but I think that happened despite my best efforts to keep myself separate from it.

I was looking to do something non-fiction because I had done a strip 'My Mom Was a Schizophrenic.' I really enjoyed the process of doing that strip despite its subject matter. To do it I'd had to do a lot of research and reading and I figured I'd like to do that again.

According to Richard Clarke the former White House counterterrorism chief Bush was so obsessed with Iraq that he failed to take action against Osama Bin Laden despite repeated warnings from his intelligence experts.

Despite our very recent appearance on the planet humanity combines arrogance with increasing material demands even as we become more numerous. Our toughness is a delusion. Have we the intelligence and discipline to vigilantly guard against our tendency to grow without limit?

It took me less than half a lifetime to realize that regret is one of the few guaranteed certainties. Sooner or later everything is touched by it despite our naive and senseless hope that just this time we will be spared its cold hand on our heart.

Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.

The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul is 'What does a woman want?'

My actions constituted pure hacking that resulted in relatively trivial expenses for the companies involved despite the government's false claims.