When the media defines something you have to question: Is it the definition that you want applied to your culture? I'm trying to determine who's leaving the legacy and if the legacy that is being left is a positive one.

America's biggest export is media and I think that's a positive thing.

I think that Americans should gradually begin to adopt positive behavior rather than doing evil. They should not expect an immediate reaction in return for their positive measures. It will take time.

I do not expect the white media to create positive black male images.

There was a widespread indignation in the American media. They were saying 'How can you make a movie during an election that's about politics? What are you doing? Are you trying to influence people's lives?' To which my response was 'Well I hope so.'

Well a lot of politics is communicating with people and obviously comedy has something to do with that. I've been a producer and led people. Also being a comedian you're under pressure.

I'm not very active politically. The causes I work on offer immediate practical accessible help and politics has never meant that to me.

I first came to think about media and politics in the late 1960s having observed some distortions up close but since then I wouldn't say that my personal experience has remained an important motive for my writing about media.

Politics is pop. Our job as comedians - especially me as a late-night talk show which is a broader audience - is to amplify what we think America is thinking.

You have a political and media elite who have an idiom by which they describe politics. It's highly highly polarised. It's right left red blue up down victorious crushed.

One of the big changes in politics has been because families individuals have felt worried insecure... worried about the economy worried about their jobs worried about their kids' futures... actually the disconnect between the public and media discourse and people's everyday concerns has become bigger not smaller.

These days politics religion media seem to get all mixed up. Television became the new religion a long time back and the media has taken over.

You know the media and politicians are always gonna be in a bit of tension with one another and probably most of the time that's healthy and indeed even creative. But it's where - it's really when news organisations are used as kind of instruments of politics that it gets tricky.

The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind... The end of poetry is not an after-effect not a pleasurable memory of itself but an immediate constant and even unpleasant insistence upon itself.

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel read 2 000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

And yet in a culture like ours which is given to material comforts and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification it is surprising that so much poetry is written.

A desire arises in the mind. It is satisfied immediately another comes. In the interval which separates two desires a perfect calm reigns in the mind. It is at this moment freed from all thought love or hate. Complete peace equally reigns between two mental waves.

My actions to promote peace the mediation missions which I carried out during many conflicts which very often occurred between brothers of the same country are not driven by any ulterior motives or any calculations based on personal ambitions.

I accepted the interviews and encounters that had to be held with the media but I would have preferred to work in peace.

Now for my own case I bless the Lord that for all that hath been said of me my conscience doth not condemn me. I do not say I am free of sin but I am at peace with God through a slain Mediator and I believe that there is no salvation but only in Christ.

When Communist U.S.S.R. was a superpower the world was better off. The right-wing media is trying to marginalize the peace movement.

Our object should be peace within and peace without. We want to live peacefully and maintain cordial friendly relations with our immediate neighbours and with the world at large.

As a young boy I read 'Cheaper by the Dozen' and immediately became neurotic about my use of time. It taxed me severely but only for the next 50 years. But I think it also allowed me to discipline myself to sit in the chair and be a writer where one of the most needed qualities is patience.

Patience is necessary and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown.