As people flock to urban centers where ground space is limited, cities with green walls and roofs and skyscraper farms offer improved health and well-being, renewable resources, reliable food supply, and relief to the environment.

Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.

What are the symbols of American strength, wealth, power and modernity? Certainly not jazz and rock and roll, not chewing-gum or hamburgers, Broadway or Hollywood. It's their skyscrapers. Their Pentagon. Their science. Their technology.

I find television, and particularly live television, very romantic: the idea that there is this small group of people, way up high, in a skyscraper in the middle of Manhattan, beaming this signal out into the night.

Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation - not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy. Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago.

Nature is impersonal, awe-inspiring, elegant, eternal. It's geometrically perfect. It's tiny and gigantic. You can travel far to be in a beautiful natural setting, or you can observe it in your backyard - or, in my case, in the trees lining New York City sidewalks, or in the clouds above skyscrapers.

People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around - the music and the ideas.

I do think being a prissy tomboy helps me in raising a son in general. I wrestle with him, play ball, play in the sandbox with him. As a mom, you get bruises, scrapes on your knee.

Sometimes astronauts feel a little ill or get minor scrapes. I trained as a crew medical officer to do basic treatment.

Asia is still dominated by skyscrapers. I hope that, in European cities, it will become a declining trend. They were almost never necessary.

The real world is the fantasy writer's scrapbook. Real history, real geography, real customs and religions are all invaluable sources of guidance and inspiration.

I'm very optimistic about the future. I'm just not optimistic about the skyscraper as a building typology that is suited for the future.

Hong Kong might be a small place, but its people make it unique. The iconic images of skyscrapers in this bustling metropolis are famous around the world, but it is the people of Hong Kong, standing up for their city on the streets, who make it truly great.

With everything that I design, from a church to a plate to skyscraper to a spoon. I am always thinking about voluptuous volumes and spaces.

When I was eight, my mum found me humming to myself and scribbling on a scrap of paper. When she asked me what I was doing, I got shy. I was writing a Christmas song, and I had never shared my music with anyone before. Reluctantly, I sang it for her... and she loved it. Of course she did - she's my mum.

Failed plans should not be interpreted as a failed vision. Visions don't change, they are only refined. Plans rarely stay the same, and are scrapped or adjusted as needed. Be stubborn about the vision, but flexible with your plan.

With correction, and given the chance, 'Terra Nova' can and will deliver seasons of transcendent images and story-telling. Failing to renew 'Terra Nova' is shortsighted, as myopic as it would have been to scrap the Hubble. 'Terra Nova' is the Hubble Telescope of television.

My grandmother spent her whole life working as a maid, a cook and a babysitter, barely scraping by, but still working hard to give my mother, her only child, a chance in life, so that my mother could give my brother and me an even better one.

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.

"I think about the Old Ones, that they have a past but no history. I think about the inevitability of death, and whether it's not that very inevitability that inspires us to take photographs and make scrapbooks and tell stories. That that's how we humans find our way to immortality. This is not a new thought; I've had such thoughts before. But I have a new thought now.

It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.

My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.

How will you know the difficulties of being human, if you are always flying off to blue perfection? Where will you plant your grief seeds? Workers need ground to scrape and hoe, not the sky of unspecified desire.

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.