Something I didn't even know was on my bucket list has been achieved. I have cooked Thanksgiving dinner with Martha Stewart. I vow to follow the gospel of her teachings and do my very best in the remarkably less glamorous kitchen of my own home... without the luxury of magically appearing prep bowls filled by a staff of sous chefs.

Gratitude is the inward feeling of kindness received. Thankfulness is the natural impulse to express that feeling. Thanksgiving is the following of that impulse.

Chum was a British boy's weekly which at the end of the year was bound into a single huge book and the following Christmas parents bought it as Christmas presents for male children.

Tranquilizers work only if you follow the advice on the bottle - keep away from children.

Never follow somebody else's path it doesn't work the same way twice for anyone... the path follows you and rolls up behind you as you walk forcing the next person to find their own way.

My favorite play in drama school was 'The Bacchae.' It's about a king who literally gets eaten alive by all the women in the play in a kind of orgy - it's related to the word 'bacchanal' - and I loved that idea of animalistic chaos and following our own desires.

It was easy to persecute me without people feeling ashamed. It was easy to vilify me and project me as a woman who was not following the tradition of a 'good African woman' and as a highly educated elitist who was trying to show innocent African women ways of doing things that were not acceptable to African men.

I've exercised with women so thin that buzzards followed them to their cars.

Writing is no dying art form in America because most published writers here accept the wisdom and the necessity of encouraging the talent that follows in their footsteps.

However I must not indulge in homespun wisdom here before so distinguished an assembly especially as I am to be followed by a representative of science.