The main thing that gives me hope is the media. We have radio TV magazines and books so we have the possibility of learning from societies that are remote from us like Somalia. We turn on the TV and see what blew up in Iraq or we see conditions in Afghanistan.

The benefit of the radio is something beyond your realm of knowledge can surprise you can enter your realm of knowledge.

Television contracts the imagination and radio expands it.

We didn't have television until I was about eight years old so it was either the movies or radio. A lot of radio drama. That was our television you know. We had to use our imagination. So it was really those two things and the comics that I immersed myself in as a child.

In this drawing we just let our imagination run wild. We visualized Superman toys games and a radio show - that was before TV - and Superman movies. We even visualized Superman billboards. And it's all come true.

You may not like the humor but that is why every radio has an on-off button.

I love the Beatles. I haven't named any kids after them but I still really love them. They were the first group that I was ever properly aware of. In my early teens I would sometimes stay in and listen to the radio all day in the hope that I would catch a song by them that I'd never heard before and be able to tape it on my radio-cassette player.

The only way I'd be caught without makeup is if my radio fell in the bathtub while I was taking a bath and electrocuted me and I was in between makeup at home. I hope my husband would slap a little lipstick on me before he took me to the morgue.

Asking the author of historical novels to teach you about history is like expecting the composer of a melody to provide answers about radio transmission.

I remember a great America where we made everything. There was a time when the only thing you got from Japan was a really bad cheap transistor radio that some aunt gave you for Christmas.