It is said that power corrupts but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.
You always do what you want to do. This is true with every act. You may say that you had to do something or that you were forced to but actually whatever you do you do by choice. Only you have the power to choose for yourself.
I try to avoid saying anything positive about any presidential candidate for fear that if I actually like them then I will kill their campaign.
At the last Celebration I spoke before an auditorium full of people and I could just feel the affection and the positive feelings that they were exuding. It was actually moving. I remember thinking 'I'm not worthy ' because 'Star Wars' is so much bigger than all of us.
It just happened that the course of the campaign went negative we actually went positive for a little over a week and you do the tracking of poll numbers and it hurt us. So the public responded to those type of ads.
I know some people will be surprised to hear it but I've found that my music whether its blues or rock or whatever you want to call it can be channeled into a positive direction that actually helps people.
I had the idea for the show like a year and a half two years ago. And it was all about the things that I didn't like about TV. I was trying to create a positive solution for it. And it actually worked.
My incarceration was actually a positive thing from the beginning. I needed a gimmick to get my act going again it gave me material.
No matter where I go - London Beirut Jerusalem Washington Beijing or Bangalore - I'm always looking to rediscover that land of ten thousand lakes where politics actually worked to make people's lives better not pull them apart.
It's much easier to wear a Chairman Mao button and shake your fists in the air and all that then to actually read the Communist manifesto and things like that and actually become involved in politics.
One of the big changes in politics has been because families individuals have felt worried insecure... worried about the economy worried about their jobs worried about their kids' futures... actually the disconnect between the public and media discourse and people's everyday concerns has become bigger not smaller.
A diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip.
There's one of my new poems actually - is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas.
I do actually dabble in a bit of poetry! And I'm yet to pen a script but it is something that I've been telling myself I want to do.
When I hit a block regardless of what I am writing what the subject matter is or what's going on in the plot I go back and I read Pablo Neruda's poetry. I don't actually speak Spanish so I read it translation. But I always go back to Neruda. I don't know why but it calms me calms my brain.
My next project is to get back to that. Actually to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.
Well the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words that is to say the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.