Politics is pop. Our job as comedians - especially me as a late-night talk show which is a broader audience - is to amplify what we think America is thinking.

You have a political and media elite who have an idiom by which they describe politics. It's highly highly polarised. It's right left red blue up down victorious crushed.

One of the big changes in politics has been because families individuals have felt worried insecure... worried about the economy worried about their jobs worried about their kids' futures... actually the disconnect between the public and media discourse and people's everyday concerns has become bigger not smaller.

These days politics religion media seem to get all mixed up. Television became the new religion a long time back and the media has taken over.

You know the media and politicians are always gonna be in a bit of tension with one another and probably most of the time that's healthy and indeed even creative. But it's where - it's really when news organisations are used as kind of instruments of politics that it gets tricky.

The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind... The end of poetry is not an after-effect not a pleasurable memory of itself but an immediate constant and even unpleasant insistence upon itself.

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel read 2 000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

And yet in a culture like ours which is given to material comforts and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification it is surprising that so much poetry is written.

A desire arises in the mind. It is satisfied immediately another comes. In the interval which separates two desires a perfect calm reigns in the mind. It is at this moment freed from all thought love or hate. Complete peace equally reigns between two mental waves.

My actions to promote peace the mediation missions which I carried out during many conflicts which very often occurred between brothers of the same country are not driven by any ulterior motives or any calculations based on personal ambitions.