Politics are beautiful. They enable a community to live collectively with one another. It's not about stabbing each other in the back it's about enabling people to reach their dreams and pursue happiness.

I couldn't have foreseen all the good things that have followed my mother's death. The renewed energy the surprising sweetness of grief. The tenderness I feel for strangers on walkers. The deeper love I have for my siblings and friends. The desire to play the mandolin. The gift of a visitation.

Grumbling is the death of love.

After graduating from flares and platforms in the early 1970s I started drama school wearing a pair of khaki dungarees with one of my Dad's Army shirts accessorised by a cat's basket doubling as a handbag. Very Lady Gaga.

To go to hospitals and see people fight and overcome cystic fibrosis or cancer or any number of illnesses is to see courage that is humbling. And athletes constantly need to be humbled.

The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one in which information is given well-defined meaning better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.

It's been my policy to view the Internet not as an 'information highway ' but as an electronic asylum filled with babbling loonies.

I won't compare ants and people but ants give us a useful model of how single members of a community can become so organized that they end up resembling in effect one big collective brain. Our own exploding population and communication technology are leading us that way.

I remember being at Greenblatt's on Sunset and some guy just walked straight up to me and he had some bling on and whatever and said something about a party down in Malibu and asked if I would jump in his car and go to the party. All I could think was 'Who are you? I don't know you and I don't care about how good your car is.'

I was turning 20 during my first record. Those decade birthdays always kind of cause me it seems to reflect look back and then look forward. I just was closing this period of my life where I was living in a car and scrambling my whole life to then signing a six-record deal with Atlantic.