If the markets had behaved badly that would obviously add to people's sense of alarm... but there has been a lot of reassurance coming particularly in the way the Brits handled all this. There seems to be no great fear that something like that is going to happen here.

The way you deal with a scare is the way you deal with a laugh. The timing has to be perfect. When you're dealing with fear or laughter - emotions that happen spontaneously - you hope it's working. But in the moment you really have no idea.

My biggest fear ever is to be involved in a plane crash so when that happened... well I'm just thankful to be alive. I'm just grateful to be here at all.

I'd gone from being this art student messing about with music to this girl with a record deal magazine front covers and all this hype. In many ways it was everything I ever wanted but when it happened all I felt was total paralysing fear.

The greatest fear that haunts this city is a suitcase bomb nuclear or germ. Many people carry small gas masks. The masses here seem to be resigned to the inevitable believing an attack of major proportions will happen.

My greatest fear is feeling like a professional novelist. Somebody who creates characters who sits down and has pieces of paper taped to the wall - what's going to happen in this scene or this act. What I like is for it to be a much more scary sloppy reflection of who I am.

Grief has limits whereas apprehension has none. For we grieve only for what we know has happened but we fear all that possibly may happen.

We all have that burning question about what happens if we lose somebody we love especially if we lose them tragically. We wonder what fear was going on we wonder if we could have reached out and touched them held their hand looked in their eyes been there.

I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again... the future is just going to be a vast conforming suburb of the soul.

Between the fear that something would happen and the hope that still it wouldn't there is much more space than one thinks. On that narrow hard bare and dark space a lot of us spend their lives.