Sometimes it hurts when I see my role being edited. But that wasn't the case with '15 Park Avenue... ' or 'Monsoon Wedding.'

I always credited my mother with inspiring me to be a writer because she was such a passionate reader. She read poetry to me as a child. But rather late in life, I've come to appreciate my father, the accountant. He was a solid, organized, get-the-job-done kind of person-and you need that piece of it to be a writer, too.

Getting over someone is a grieving process. You mourn the loss of the relationship, and that's only expedited by 'Out of sight, out of mind.' But when you walk outside and see them on a billboard or on TV or on the cover of a magazine, it reopens the wound. It's a high-class problem, but it's real.

People like the feeling of access that is very raw, unedited, and inspirational.

Nothing manifests more persuasively the American contradiction than that the author of the Declaration of Independence, a slave owner, wrote an antislavery clause into the document - as if to compel himself to be better than he was - which then had to be edited out so the Southern states, including Thomas Jefferson's own, would sign it.

'The Dublin Magazine' has been edited with good taste, and it is very agreeable reading, but to speak quite candidly, I do not believe in the future of any literary journal any more than I believe in the future of the Trinity.

Equality of outcome is a discredited concept, failing on both logical and historical grounds, as anyone knows who has studied the misery of the 20th century.

If I fail to remove Marcos and vindicate the people's verdict by peaceful, nonviolent action, my methods will be discredited. And if anger persists, I will be marginalized, and others will take over leadership of the movement.

So this is where all the vapid talk about the 'soul' of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The 'vacuum' will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now. One thinks of the painstaking, cloud-dispelling labor of British scientists from Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to Charles Darwin to Ernest Rutherford to Alan Turing and Francis Crick, much of it built upon the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus, only to see it casually slandered by a moral and intellectual weakling from the usurping House of Hanover. An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific.

Even though the Bible is an ancient document, every person in every situation in every society that's ever existed can find in this book things that endure forever. Here's a book that never needs another edition. It never needs to be edited, never has to be updated, is never out of date or obsolete. It speaks to us as pointedly and directly as it ever has to anyone in any century since it was written. It's so pure that it lasts forever.

In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, 'life' is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big ? ironically, at just the point when some of those out to destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it. The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith.

But life isn't something that should be edited. Life shouldn't be cut. The only way you'll ever discover what it truly means to be alive and human is by sharing the full experience of what it means to be human and each blemish and freckle that comes with it.

But now with technology I could sit down and do a bunch of character drawings and scan them into a computer and the computer using my exact style could bring it into life where it would have been edited by various human beings before.

As part of our layered approach we have expedited the deployment of new Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) units to help detect concealed metallic and non-metallic threats on passengers. These machines are now in use at airports nationwide and the vast majority of travelers say they prefer this technology to alternative screening measures.

Getting over someone is a grieving process. You mourn the loss of the relationship and that's only expedited by 'Out of sight out of mind.' But when you walk outside and see them on a billboard or on TV or on the cover of a magazine it reopens the wound. It's a high-class problem but it's real.

Whenever I think about movies I always look at that art process as having the best of a lot of worlds. Because if you watch a great film you have a musical element to it not just on the scoring but in the way that the shots are edited - that has music and rhythm and time.

Unless there is meaningful change in Syria and an end to the crackdown President Assad and those around him will find themselves isolated internationally and discredited within Syria.

Willem de Kooning is generally credited for coming out of the painterly gates strong in the forties revolutionizing art and abstraction and reaching incredible heights by the early fifties and then tailing off.