I had to act in a school play when I was about ten years old. I really didn't want to do it. But everyone had to do it so I didn't have a choice. A talent agent came and watched it and later gave me some work. It's funny because I'd always known that I wanted a movie career. I just didn't think that I would be in the movies.

Cheryl Cole and Katy Perry are two of the hottest girls in the world - and so normal and funny with it. If I was a few years older they are the kind of girls I'd like to date. I want a younger version of Cheryl and Katy - a mixture of the two would be hot.

Comediennes are the lucky ones because if you're funny you can be 125 years old and they will still accept you.

But you can't focus on things that matter if all you've been is asleep for forty years. Funny how sleep rhymes with sheep. You know.

I'm not a real movie star. I've still got the same wife I started out with twenty-eight years ago.

I haven't spoken to my wife in years. I didn't want to interrupt her.

I loved my 17 years with R.E.M. but I'm ready to reflect assess and move on to a different phase of my life. The four of us will continue our close friendship and I look forward to hearing their future efforts as the world's biggest R.E.M. fan.

When Ted Williams was here inducted into the Hall of Fame 37 years ago he said he must have earned it because he didn't win it because of his friendship with the writers. I guess in that way I'm proud to be in this company that way.

In those early years in New York when I was a stranger in a big city it was the companionship and later friendship which I was offered in the Linnean Society that was the most important thing in my life.

I came to Venice for the first time in 1968 and was lucky enough to make the acquaintanceship and then the friendship of two Venetians Roberta and Franco who remain my best friends here after almost 50 years.

I would have told him that I appreciated his friendship through the years and that I had learned a lot from him. I really loved Frank like you do a brother.

My first experiences of academic friendship made me smile in after years when I looked back on them. But my circle of acquaintances had gradually grown so large that it was only natural new friendships should grow out of it.

I hope to continue my friendship with France and its filmmakers for many years to come.

Some people are willing to betray years of friendship just to get a little bit of the spotlight.

It must be remembered that the sea is a great breeder of friendship. Two men who have known each other for twenty years find that twenty days at sea bring them nearer than ever they were before or else estrange them.

A growing number of young women who have the freedom to decide have decided that career can wait and the delicious early years of their children's lives can't.

When I went off to the army when I was 17 years old I believed in America and the rights of freedom. But today I believe my government is lying to the American people and that my president George Bush is a criminal.

There's also a sense of freedom. I was so obsessed by this problem that I was thinking about if all the time - when I woke up in the morning when I went to sleep at night and that went on for eight years.

Government has the role of suiting people for freedom. People aren't made for freedom spontaneously. There's sort of a 19-year race between when people are born and when they become adults. And government has a role in making them at the end of 19 years suited to be upright trustworthy repositories of popular sovereignty.

Widespread state control over art and culture has left no room for freedom of expression in the country. For more than 60 years anyone with a dissenting opinion has been suppressed. Chinese art is merely a product: it avoids any meaningful engagement. There is no larger context. Its only purpose is to charm viewers with its ambiguity.

At 6 years old the ice became a place for me to express myself. Because I was so shy off the ice it became my safe haven with music and freedom and self-expression. That was my emotional outlet.

Because if you lived as I did several years under Nazi totalitarianism and then 20 years in communist totalitarianism you would certainly realize how precious freedom is and how easy it is to lose your freedom.

For the past several years I have remained what others would consider underground. I did this in order to build a community of people like-minded in their desire for freedom and the right to pursue their goals and lives without being manipulated and controlled by a media protected military industrial complex with a completely different agenda.

I had spent many years pursuing excellence because that is what classical music is all about... Now it was dedicated to freedom and that was far more important.