When Whitney Houston died I felt great sadness. My sadness of course was about our collective loss - when you listened to this nightingale sing your body would drop into a chair your head would tilt up a small smile would creep across your face and inside you knew that there was a higher power somewhere: gifted beautiful spiritual.

In science there is only physics all the rest is stamp collecting.

We're as clever as we think we are but we'll be a lot cleverer when we learn to use not just one brain but to pool huge numbers of brains. We're at a level technologically where we can share information and think collectively about our problems. We do it in science all the time - there's no reason why we can't do it in other endeavors.

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

Science is built up of facts as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.

I was meant to date the captain of the football team I was going to be on a romantic excursion every Saturday night I was destined to be collecting corsages from every boy in town before prom accepting such floral offerings like competing sacrifices to a Delphic goddess.

I still collect comics. I still have a great love and respect for the genre.

I work on words quite separately to music. They're both ongoing and I don't ever feel like I'm working in a cycle in that respect because it's every day anyway no matter what I'm doing. Then I get to a point when I've collected together enough words that seem like they want to be songs rather than poems or sometimes not.

I love the idea of the teachings of Jesus Christ and the beautiful stories about it which I loved in Sunday school and I collected all the little stickers and put them in my book. But the reality is that organised religion doesn't seem to work. It turns people into hateful lemmings and it's not really compassionate.

I've just finished my next collection Possible Side Effects and I'm now working on a collection of holiday stories as well as a memoir about my relationship with my father.

I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.

We believe in a flexible union of free member states who share treaties and institutions and pursue together the ideal of co-operation to represent and promote the values of European civilisation in the world advance our shared interests by using our collective power to open markets and to build a strong economic base across the whole of Europe.

African art is functional it serves a purpose. It's not a dormant. It's not a means to collect the largest cheering section. It should be healing a source a joy. Spreading positive vibrations.

I've got a book of poetry by the bed one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.

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.

So now I have a collection of poetry by Aaron Neville and I give it to people I want to share it with. I'd like to publish it someday.

I published privately a collection of my serious poetry I had written over the years. I only published 50 copies which I gave to friends in a special deluxe edition. It was ridiculously expensive but I'm glad that I did it.