I've been working hard at assuming Court polish, but the more I learn about what really goes on behind the pretty voices and waving fans and graceful bows, the more I comprehend that what is really said matters little, so long as the manner in which it is said pleases. I understand it, but I don't like it. Were I truly influential, then I would halt this foolishness that decrees that in Court one cannot be sick; that to admit you are sick is really to admit to political or social or romantic defeat; that to admit to any emotions usually means one really feels the opposite. It is a terrible kind of falsehood that people can only claim feelings as a kind of social weapon.

My choice of Muhammad to lead the list of the world's most influential persons may surprise some readers and may be questioned by others, but he was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both the religious and secular level.

The portraits, of more historical than artistic interest, had gone; and tapestry, full of the blue and bronze of peacocks, fell over the doors, and shut out all history and activity untouched with beauty and peace; and now when I looked at my Crevelli and pondered on the rose in the hand of the Virgin, wherein the form was so delicate and precise that it seemed more like a thought than a flower, or at the grey dawn and rapturous faces of my Francesca, I knew all a Christian's ecstasy without his slavery to rule and custom; when I pondered over the antique bronze Gods and Goddesses, which I had mortgaged my house to buy, I had all a pagan's delight in various beauty and without his terror at sleepless destiny and his labour with many sacrifices; and I had only to go to my bookshelf, where every book was bound in leather, stamped with intricate ornament, and of a carefully chosen colour: Shakespeare in the orange of the glory of the world, Dante in the dull red of his anger, Milton in the blue grey of his formal calm; and I could experience what I would of human passions without their bitterness and without satiety. I had gathered about me all Gods because I believed in none, and experienced every pleasure because I gave myself to none, but held myself apart, individual, indissoluble, a mirror of polished steel: I looked in the triumph of this imagination at the birds of Hera, glowing in the firelight as though they were wrought of jewels; and to my mind, for which symbolism was a necessity, they seemed the doorkeepers of my world, shutting out all that was not of as affluent a beauty as their own; and for a moment I thought as I had thought in so many other moments, that it was possible to rob life of every bitterness except the bitterness of death; and then a thought which had followed this thought, time after time, filled me with a passionate sorrow.

People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all. I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed.

J'ai lu les postmodernistes avec un certain int?r?t avec m?me admiration. Mais quand je les lis, j'ai toujours cet horrible sentiment lancinant que quelque chose d'absolument essentiel est oubli?. Plus on dit qu'une personne est un produit social, ou un confluent de forces ou fragment?e, ou marginalis?e et plus on ouvre tout un nouveau monde d'excuses.

I think having a vision can make someone an influential man. I'm not talking about acting or anything like that I'm talking about people I admire whether it's a writer or a musician or a sports figure or a politician whatever.

In a repressive society a writer can be deeply influential but in a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption the act of terror may be the only meaningful act.

Unfortunately our affluent society has also been an effluent society.

I could speak Spanish fluently growing up but I'm so out of practice and I have such a tremendous respect for songwriting in the Spanish language.

The major obstacle to a religious renewal is the intellectual classes who are highly influential and tend to view religion as primitive superstition. They believe that science has left atheism as the only respectable intellectual stance.

That was a time when I did love music I couldn't get enough of what was going on. Maybe it was Nirvana that brought me back. I guess it was a comfort because something that sounded so right - and non-commercial - had become so influential so immediately.

But you know if you live an affluent lifestyle there are all types of trappings that are there that you have to be cognizant of and you've got to try and communicate freely and gain understanding about and then keep moving on because you know sometimes lifestyles are chosen for us as opposed to us choosing them.

I want to see as many movies as I can and I covet a lot of weird influential movies.

I want to go to college to study journalism. I want to speak French fluently to travel. My mom was a journalist and it's in my blood.

It's like learning a language you can't speak a language fluently until you find out who you are in that language and that has as much to do with your body as it does with vocabulary and grammar.

As long as acquiring knowledge is the educational goal of schools educational opportunities will be limited as they are now to affluent families.

The most influential of all educational factors is the conversation in a child's home.

Ray Bradbury is for many reasons the most influential writer in my life. Throughout our long friendship Ray supplied not only his terrific stories but a grand model of what a writer could be should be and yet rarely is: brilliant and charming and accessible willing to tolerate and to teach happy to inspire but also to be inspired.

Without in any way minimising the economic and psychological blow that people experience when they lose their jobs the unemployed in affluent countries still have a safety net in the form of social security payments and usually free healthcare and free education for their children. They also have sanitation and safe drinking water.

I'd love to go to art school. I'd love to learn how to draw. I'd love to be fluent in Spanish. I'd like to be a brain surgeon.