"I'm gonna kill him," Eve said, or at least that was what it sounded like filtered through the pillow.

"Is this Clarissa Fray?" The voice on the other end of the phone sounded familiar, though not immediately identifiable.

I am Me. In all the world, there is no one else exactly like me. Everything that comes out of me is authentically mine, because I alone chose it -- I own everything about me: my body, my feelings, my mouth, my voice, all my actions, whether they be to others or myself. I own my fantasies, my dreams, my hopes, my fears. I own my triumphs and successes, all my failures and mistakes. Because I own all of me, I can become intimately acquainted with me. By so doing, I can love me and be friendly with all my parts. I know there are aspects about myself that puzzle me, and other aspects that I do not know -- but as long as I am friendly and loving to myself, I can courageously and hopefully look for solutions to the puzzles and ways to find out more about me. However I look and sound, whatever I say and do, and whatever I think and feel at a given moment in time is authentically me. If later some parts of how I looked, sounded, thought, and felt turn out to be unfitting, I can discard that which is unfitting, keep the rest, and invent something new for that which I discarded. I can see, hear, feel, think, say, and do. I have the tools to survive, to be close to others, to be productive, and to make sense and order out of the world of people and things outside of me. I own me, and therefore, I can engineer me. I am me, and I am Okay.

You're like a lighthouse shining beside the sea of humanity, motionless: all you can see is your own reflection in the water. You're alone, so you think it's a vast, magnificent panorama. You haven't sounded the depths. You simply believe in the beauty of God's creation. But I have spent all this time in the water, diving deep into the howling ocean of life, deeper than anyone. While you were admiring the surface, I saw the shipwrecks, the drowned bodies, the monsters of the deep

Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy.

"After you're gone, people will forget your name, no matter how important it was, and your face, no matter how pretty it was, and what you said, no matter how clever any of it sounded.

Falling in love is very real, but I used to shake my head when people talked about soul mates, poor deluded individuals grasping at some supernatural ideal not intended for mortals but sounded pretty in a poetry book. Then, we met, and everything changed, the cynic has become the converted, the sceptic, an ardent zealot.

You may be right that people say: 'You know what we had Obama. He was inexperienced. The guy had great rhetoric sounded good looked good but has turned out to be an utter disaster. I want someone where I have confidence and credibility that they're up to the job and that I can trust what they tell me.'

Both my grandmothers had upright pianos and I just knew how to play since I was a child. Nobody taught me. I sounded like a grown-up and then I learned how to read music. I played so well by ear I could fool the teacher to believe I could play the notes. She'd make the mistake of playing the song once and I could play it.

When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989 my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then.

I left because I could no longer make records that sounded less and less like me. I tried to please people instead of believing in my own strength until the only thing I could do was walk away.

Drums just always sounded like the most fun part of that good music for me.

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.

In the morning on Sunday a drum is sounded at about 8 o'clock.

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.

Back then I didn't think a woman like that or a relationship like that could exist with complete freedom and no jealousy or possessiveness. I thought it sounded too good to be true and I was certainly convinced it wasn't the life for me!

Unfortunately the real achievements of children on the ground became debased and devalued because Labor education secretaries sounded like Soviet commissars praising the tractor production figures when we know that those exams were not the rock-solid measures of achievement that children deserve.

I led the life of an intellectual up until a certain age. I remember Freud's 'Interpretation of Dreams' was a big favorite when I was 11. It sounded so interesting. And it really was!

I'm a big techno fan. I love that thumping kick drum. We heard a version of 'Lost in Love' and it was thrash metal. It sounded cool!

I was asked to do a test commercial shoot for an Apple product which didn't mean much to me at the time. Some music player that holds all your songs. Sounded cool to me and I never gave up an opportunity to work especially with the possibility of it turning into a national commercial. Coolest job I did in that time.

Former President Bill Clinton who is widely regarded as a political mastermind may have sounded like a traditional liberal at the beginning of his term in office. But what ultimately defined his presidency was his amazing pliability on matters of principle.