I have long thought that anyone who does not regularly - or ever - gaze up and see the wonder and glory of a dark night sky filled with countless stars loses a sense of their fundamental connectedness to the universe.

I've been at this for 40 years. And, as an academic, I've been content with relatively small audiences, with the thought that the audience I long for will find its way eventually to what I have written, provided that what I have written is good enough.

I thought I had too much money to be happy and normal. Thousand of pounds is just too much for a working person to handle all of a sudden, and I felt I didn't deserve it.

I didn't want to do 'Casino Royale' when they told me to audition. I said no. Then they sent me the script, and I thought it was actually very interesting - and I had no other work at the time.

Would it not be much better to have a president who deliberately lied to the people because he thought a war was essential than to have one who was so dumb as to be taken in by intelligence agencies, especially those who told him what he wanted to hear?

And I also thought that Richard Nixon was the greatest political education we have ever had, but it looks like we need to relearn them again.

I loved the Godfather. I thought that was the best interpretation of our life that I've ever seen. Godfather I and Godfather II - the other one stunk.

It wasn't the way I looked at a man, it was the thought behind it.

As I've gotten older, I've gotten more liberal, and my father is increasingly conservative. It's so shocking to me because I always thought we had the same politics. The day I realized we voted for different presidents, I practically fell out of my chair.

I thought it was terrible. I don't know who to believe. Williams was very loyal and honest. Nobody could ever say different. Sometimes, that got him into a lot of trouble. But after he died and they cut his head off, that made me sick.

Before we got married, I had tremendous ambition. Once we got married and I started having children, then I just thought that that was my real life. Steve was definitely more ambitious than I.

Given that there was that era of girl group music and it's still very popular, but I think if you looked at the chart from that time you would see many more men on it. Because the industry, they were catering to young girls. I mean, that's what they thought their audience was.

I have a really hard time writing my own lyrics for this record, because one, I had to write so many and also I was kind of perplexed by the idea of how I was going to sing and play... because at that time, we hadn't really thought about asking someone else.

I had been to the South many times and I thought I knew what the South was, but not until you live with people and live through their lives do you know what it's really about.

We worked out a lot of bugs and figured out who was working and who wasn't and how this beast functions. It was a lot bigger than we actually thought, and now we have a well-run ship where it feels I can actually have time to imagine and not just stress out about everything.