The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment but it is no less a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy.

Racism has been for everyone like a horrible tragic car crash and we've all been heavily sedated from it. If we don't come into consciousness of this tragedy there's going to be a violent awakening we don't want. The question is can we wake up?

The abduction of a child is a tragedy. No one can fully understand or appreciate what a parent goes through at such a time unless they have faced a similar tragedy. Every parent responds differently. Each parent copes with this nightmare in the best way he or she knows how.

One of the greatest things drama can do at it's best is to redefine the words we use every day such as love home family loyalty and envy. Tragedy need not be a downer.

Great tragedy has come to us and we are meeting it with the best that is in our country with courage and concern for others because this is America. This is who we are.

The world is a crazy beautiful ugly complicated place and it keeps moving on from crisis to strangeness to beauty to weirdness to tragedy. The caravan keeps moving on and the job of the longform writer or filmmaker or radio broadcaster is to stop - is to pause - and when the caravan goes away that's when this stuff comes.

I think I would cope like anyone copes with any tragedy. I'm sure I would be very upset for a while and then there would come a point where I would either have to stay in this place of darkness and anger or I'd have to accept that it happened.

Everybody knows about Pearl Harbor. The thing that really fascinated me is that through this tragedy there was this amazing American heroism.