Jazz took too much discipline. You have to come in at the right place which is different than me singing the blues where I can sing 'Oh baby ' if there's a pause in the melody. With jazz you better leave that space open or put in something real cool.

My family moved - first to Washington D.C. and then in the spring of 1975 to Lebanon where my father worked as a diplomat at the American embassy. My parents were enthusiastic about the move so my older brother and I felt like we were off to some place kind of cool.

I want to go to college and go back to Georgetown. It's a really cool place.

I've always been scared of advertising folk. I've met them at parties and I've been to their offices and I've always found them intimidatingly cool. At one company I visited they held their meetings in a caravan that had somehow been installed in the place a rather more exotic place to gather than the typical BBC glass box.

It's cool to go places where working people are happy.

Placebo is music for outsiders by outsiders and our gigs are like conventions of outcasts which is cool.

Theaters are always going to be around and doing fine. With computers and technology we're becoming more and more secluded from each other. And the movie theater is one of the last places where we can still gather and experience something together. I don't think the desire for that magic will ever go away.

I think I was lucky to come of age in a place and time - the American South in the 1960s and '70s - when the machine hadn't completely taken over life. The natural world was still the world and machines - TV telephone cars - were still more or less ancillary and computers were unheard of in everyday life.

Learning can take place in the backyard if there is a human being there who cares about the child. Before learning computers children should learn to read first. They should sit around the dinner table and hear what their parents have to say and think.

We have an epidemic of sexual predators following our children whether it be on the computers whether it be in our public parks whether it be in the workplace or even our schools.

People are so bad at driving cars that computers don't have to be that good to be much better. Any time you stand in line at the D.M.V. and look around you're like Oh my God I wish all these people were replaced by computer drivers.

Computers have virtually replaced tape recorders.

Computers are magnificent tools for the realization of our dreams but no machine can replace the human spark of spirit compassion love and understanding.

The first work of the director is to set a mood so that the actor's work can take place so that the actor can create. And in order to do that you have to communicate communicate with the actors. And direction is about communication on all levels.

The eventual place the American army should take on the western front was to a large extent influenced by the vital question of communication and supply.

Unlike then the mail stream of today has diminished by such things as e-mails and faxes and cell phones and text messages largely electronic means of communication that replace mail.

These sites have torn down the geographical divide that once prevented long distance social relationships from forming allowing instant communication and connections to take place and a virtual second life to take hold for its users.

The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

What creates freedom? A revolution in the streets? Mass protest? Civil war? A change of government? The ousting of the old guard and its replacement by the new? History more often than not shows that hopes raised by such events are often dashed sooner rather than later.

We have no reason to think that climate change is harmful if you look at the world as a whole. Most places in fact are better off being warmer than being colder. And historically the really bad times for the environment and for people have been the cold periods rather than the warm periods.

No foreigner has a place asking another people another country to change their constitution.

To be in a situation where you have no rights whatsoever is something I wish everybody could experience. People's attitudes would change. It would be a better place.

It's coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It's not just climate change it's sheer space places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us and the natural world is doing it for us right now.