Women rule the world. It's not really worth fighting because they know what they're doing. Ask Napoleon. Ask Adam. Ask Richard Burton or Richie Sambora. Many a man has crumbled.

Writing allows me the time to travel and see the world which is what I always wanted to do. I'd really like to have been Sir Richard Francis Burton but it's the wrong century.

I have good relationships with Hillary Clinton Joseph Biden and especially Richard Holbrooke - he is my teacher. I learned a lot of great things from him.

In the 18th century James Hargreaves invented the Spinning Jenny and Richard Arkwright pioneered the water-propelled spinning frame which led to the mass production of cotton. This was truly revolutionary. The cotton manufacturers created a whole new class of people - the urban proletariat. The structure of society itself would never be the same.

Plus you know when I was young there was a lot of respect for clowning in rock music - look at Little Richard. It was a part of the whole thing and I always also believed that it released the audience.

I'm an atheist but I'm very relaxed about it. I don't preach my atheism but I have a huge amount of respect for people like Richard Dawkins who do.

The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent at least since the early nineteenth century when 3 000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa.

Clinton and Obama practice this politics known quaintly as the Richard Speck strategy: if you cannot take on everyone in the room at once take them out of the room one at a time.

I had a couple of movies that I was passionately involved with that I could never get made. 'Richard Pryor ' I wrote for - gosh - over a year. That was close to getting made for two-and-a-half years after that. We're still pushing it you know. It is weird. Suddenly you wake up and it's like 'God five years have gone by.'

I grew up watching those blaxploitation movies. Ron O'Neal Richard Roundtree Jim Brown Pam Grier. For the first time I saw 'The Negro' get one over on 'The Man.'