I wrote those poems for myself as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.

For many years it seemed as if nothing changed in Norway. You could leave the country for three months travel the world through coups d'etat assassinations famines massacres and tsunamis and come home to find that the only new thing in the newspapers was the crossword puzzle.

For years I had no time for exploratory travel.

Songs really are like a form of time travel because they really have moved forward in a bubble. Everyone who's connected with it the studio's gone the musicians are gone and the only thing that's left is this recording which was only about a three-minute period maybe 70 years ago.

Each day as I travel through downtown Tucson I am amazed at how quickly the most ancient of human behaviors have changed. For as long as there have been Homo sapiens - roughly 200 000 years - people have filled their lives principally with two activities: talking directly with other people and doing physical things.

Could I say that the reason that I am here today you know from the mouth of the State Department itself is: I should not be allowed to travel because I have struggled for years for the independence of the colonial peoples of Africa.

I've always traveled as a kid my parents moved me around a different place in Germany every four years. But I got the travel bug when I was a kid living in different countries.

What will I be doing in twenty years' time? I'll be dead darling! Are you crazy?

Time is not measured by the passing of years but by what one does what one feels and what one achieves.

I sacrifice in my love life and my social life but those things will be there in three or four years. This is a really important time in my life. I can't just be the girl who sang 'I Kissed a Girl.' I have to leave a legacy.

I take a very practical view of raising children. I put a sign in each of their rooms: 'Checkout Time is 18 years.'

I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.

Time is a beautiful thing. It's like when you meet an old lover on the street six years later and they don't look so ugly anymore.

All of us who are members of the Germanic peoples can be happy and thankful that once in thousands of years fate has given us from among the Germanic peoples such a genius a leader our Fuehrer Adolf Hitler and you should be happy to be allowed to work with us.

I have spent over 60 years bent over a guitar and to know that I wrote 70 compositions that masters have recorded that makes me feel so good and full and proud and thankful to the good Lord.

I'm really thankful and complimented when people come to me and say thank you for the great times for all these years. But I don't think about it as being a leader.

I've been allowed to grow over the past twenty years. I've managed to avoid being trapped in one moment of my career and for that I'm very thankful.

I progressed through so many different styles of music through my teen years both as a player and a vocalist particularly the jazz and pop of the early 20th Century.

When I was growing up particularly during puberty in my teen years I was so miserable because I elicited so much teasing and meanness from my teenage cohorts.

Yeah I spent my teen years in West Virginia and when I was a kid in Louisiana. I definitely have that exposure to two different sorts of rural: the South and Appalachia.

I think I'm also more open to other writers being present and listening to other opinions whereas before I was going through my angsty teen years while making records.

Since my teen years I was interested in martial arts.

I think anybody who's doing work in their teen years on TV or in the movies you're a teen idol by default.

When I started out as a music journalist at the end of the 1980s it was generally assumed that we were living through the lamest music era the world would ever see. But those were also the years when hip-hop exploded beatbox disco soared indie rock took off and new wave invented a language of teen angst.