We want our government to protect us, to make sure something like 9/11 never happens again. We quickly moved to give law enforcement more power to do this. But that now begs the question, did we move to fast? Did we give too much power away? I don't have the answer.
If you can help other people understand those truths - and in my mind, the only way I know to do that is with large scale, multi-year research projects, where you start with a question and then very rigorously and comprehensively answer that question.
All of my books have the potential to become movies, it's just a question of finding a studio who wants to get behind me and put up the money to make the movie.
I read Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Reader's Digest... I read some responsible journalism, and from that, I form my own opinions. I also happen to be intelligent, and I question everything.
If not for music, I would probably be a very frustrated scientist. It's one way to answer the question, 'What is the meaning of life?' I feel music answers it better.
It has nothing to do with commercial success. You cannot calculate in your head how to put the mosaic together to make a commercial film: that's out of the question.
It has generally been assumed that of two opposing systems of philosophy, e.g., realism and idealism, one only can be true and one must be false; and so philosophers have been hopelessly divided on the question, which is the true one.
Conservatism clings to what has been established, fearing that, once we begin to question the beliefs that we have inherited, all the values of life will be destroyed.
My response, a dubious and hesitant one, is that it has been and may continue to be, in the time that is left to me, more productive to live out the question than to try to answer it in abstract terms.
As the books grew bigger and more ambitious, the situations in question sometimes became political ones, and so it became necessary to start painting in the social background on a scale which eventually became panoramic.
I came here as a practical man, to talk, not simply on the question of peace and war, but to treat another question which is of hardly less importance - the enormous and burdensome standing armaments which it is the practice of modern Governments to sustain in time of peace.
