Generally I'm a pretty positive but like any other working person if the jobs aren't coming in I do get depressed.

Flexible working is not just for women with children. It is necessary at the other end of the scale. If people can move into part-time work instead of retirement then that will be a huge help. If people can fit their work around caring responsibilities for the elderly the disabled then again that's very positive.

No matter what you're going through there's a light at the end of the tunnel and it may seem hard to get to it but you can do it and just keep working towards it and you'll find the positive side of things.

The challenge in working in politics particularly if you're working for a political party is that everyone's a messenger.

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

When I first started working in politics as a junior aide on Walter Mondale's 1984 presidential campaign it never occurred to me that I would one day work in the White House. There were plenty of women among the volunteers who stuffed envelopes and walked precincts. But there were fewer and fewer on each successive level of influence and access.

And inasmuch as the bridge is a symbol of all such poetry as I am interested in writing it is my present fancy that a year from now I'll be more contented working in an office than ever before.

That's a wonderful change that's taken place and so most poetry today is published if not directly by the person certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself working with his friends.

I've done a number of readings at poetry lounges in Vancouver and Los Angeles. I've compiled a book of poetry that's completed and two others I'm working on.

When you translate poetry in particular you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words sentences phrases the triple tension between the line of verse the syntax and the sentence.

The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class and everyone from it I've met and think they're incredibly witty inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.

I'm conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There's hardly a day that goes past on which I don't write poetry.

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them and I am a poet of memory.

The plan shows that the twenty million people in the German democratic Republic and in the democratic sector of Berlin think only of peace and that they are working for freedom and peaceful prosperity.

Without peace and without the overwhelming majority of people that believe in peace defending it working for it believing in it security can never really be a reality.

Today we have two Vietnams side by side North and South exchanging and working. We may not agree with all that North Vietnam is doing but they are living in peace. I would look for a better human rights record for North Vietnam but they are living side by side.

The lessons from the peace process are clear whatever life throws at us our individual responses will be all the stronger for working together and sharing the load.

I can promise you that women working together - linked informed and educated - can bring peace and prosperity to this forsaken planet.

Because I'm the author of my screenplays I know what I'm looking for. It's true that I can be stubborn in demanding that I get what I want but it's also a question of working with patience and love.

I know I'm not known as method. By nature I'm not a brooder. What I continue to use is a mixture of the English school which is traditionally outside-in and the more American way of working from the inside out.

We have been working with Habitat for Humanity and we have built eighty homes 80% of which are being lived in by New Orleans' musicians. It is called the Musicians' Village and at the center is the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music.

Most recently we've been working in concert situations rather than clubs. because there aren't too many rooms there like Ronnie Scott's that are pure music rooms where people come specifically to listen to music.

If I had to play only for people who liked the music because they heard it on the radio it wouldn't make me happy. That's why I'm working so hard to have yes a profile as an artist but also a profile as a DJ.

What I'm trying to do is find either existing properties or come up with properties or angles or stories which will create music drama. It's my obsession and most of all I would like to remain working in theatre. I think it's very much alive.