I like to write sad songs. They're much easier to write and you get a lot more emotion into them. But people don't want to hear them as much. And radio definitely doesn't they want that positive uptempo thing.

To me it doesn't matter how good you are. Sport is all about playing and competing. Whatever you do in cricket and in sport enjoy it be positive and try to win.

I just want to put some positive stuff out there. If it works great. If it doesn't no problem.

What I really like is an intelligent review. It doesn't have to be positive. A review that has some kind of insight and sometimes people say something that's startling or is so poignant.

Say and do something positive that will help the situation it doesn't take any brains to complain.

There is this concept of politics as a dirty game. It's a difficult game but it doesn't have to be dirty. I think this is what we need to bring to politics. I think politics around the world has very often been captured by big interests - 'lobbies' they call them in the States.

We don't tend to write about disease in fiction - not just teen novels but all American novels - because it doesn't fit in with our idea of the heroic romantic epic. There is room only for sacrifice heroism war politics and family struggle.

I think one of the most threatening places to be in politics is a black conservative because there are so many liberals who want to continue to reinforce a stereotype that doesn't exist about America.

I don't for the life of me understand how anybody could contemplate the results of the 2000 election in the US and say that electoral politics doesn't matter any more and that Ralph Nader was right when he said there is no difference between the two parties.

I have a lot of nice Italian winter clothes that make me look like a sophisticated Lebanese professor so my friend Robert and I go around pretending to be experts in Arabic politics. It doesn't work in the summer though. I don't have the right clothes.

Politics is a lot of serendipity. You're in the right place and the right time and you've got the right message and it either connects for you or or it doesn't.

And humility in politics means accepting that one party doesn't have all the answers recognising that working in partnership is progress not treachery.

But I think it's quite clear in my work that my orientation isn't political or doesn't come out of modern politics.

I'm an independent. I'm a centrist. A new generation is arriving that has grown up with a multiplicity of choice in every aspect of their lives and yet politics is the last place that they are told that they should be satisfied with a choice between brand A and brand B. It doesn't fit the way they think. It doesn't fit the way they live.

I never got into politics for it to be a career. It doesn't take a lot of strength to hang on. It takes a lot of strength to let go.

By nominating Chuck Hagel to be his Defense secretary President Obama is putting forward an aloof contrarian who doesn't suffer fools - a striving politician who considers himself above politics.

You have to take away some of tax breaks for the wealthy and you have to cut back on some entitlements. Because unless we do all of these things it just doesn't work. And what's good theater and what's good politics isn't necessarily good economic policy.

Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you.

I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected President but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power.

Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.

I think that concrete poetry seems to have as far as I can see come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.

When you're looking that far out you're giving people their place in the universe it touches people. Science is often visual so it doesn't need translation. It's like poetry it touches you.

Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.

I think I'm a very good reader of poetry but obviously like everybody I have a set of criteria for reading poems and I'm not shy about presenting them so if people ask for my critical response to a poem I tell them what works and why and what doesn't work and why.