I am the baby in the family and I always will be. I am actually very happy to have that position. But I still get teased. I don't mind that.

Maybe there is no actual place called hell. Maybe hell is just having to listen to our grandparents breathe through their noses when they're eating sandwiches.

I've spent the last 50 years or so steeping myself in the world's religions and I've done my homework. I've gone to each of the world's eight great religions and sought out the most profound scholars I could find and I've apprenticed myself to them and actually practiced each faith.

I have a disproportionate amount of faith in the goodness of the world and that everything will actually work out okay.

For me and I suspect for lots of other people too bad things actually sometimes make you think more about faith and the fact that you're not facing these things on your own.

Has Bill Clinton inspired idealism in the young as he himself was inspired by John F. Kennedy? Or has he actually reduced their idealism? Surely part of the answer lies in Clinton's personal moral lapse with Monica Lewinsky. But more important was his sin of omission - his failure to embrace a moral cause beyond popularity.

The vast majority of large scale change efforts fail. Which means that the probability that you have actually experienced a failure and your people know that and are pessimistic therefore about trying something again is very high.

We have actually experienced in recent months a dramatic demonstration of an unprecedented intelligence failure perhaps the most significant intelligence failure in the history of the United States.

So I try not to have any actual expectations for myself for any level of success or failure.

There would seem to be a limit even for an art preoccupied with boundaries and transgressions beyond which a work reaches its breaking point and becomes an actual failure a mere experimentation.