You know I started my career in politics in 1967. I'm not new to this. I did not just fall off the Christmas tree. I understand the world is complex. I know that there are people out there who want to hurt other people.

London in the '70s was a pretty catastrophic dump I can tell you. We had every kind of industrial trouble we had severe energy problems we were under constant terrorist attack from Irish terrorist groups who started a bombing campaign in English cities politics were fantastically polarized between left and right.

When I started 'CNN ' I made the decision to stay out of endorsing candidates and let the doers make up their own minds about politics that it wasn't going to come from me.

When I first started working in politics as a junior aide on Walter Mondale's 1984 presidential campaign it never occurred to me that I would one day work in the White House. There were plenty of women among the volunteers who stuffed envelopes and walked precincts. But there were fewer and fewer on each successive level of influence and access.

I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean the clues were in the poems but they didn't read them very carefully and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.

Well - I started writing - probably in the early 60s and by say '65-'66 I had read most of the poetry that had been published - certainly in the 20 years prior to that.

Probably induced by the asthma I started reading and writing early on my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.

Well I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it it was my great refuge through adolescence.

I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.

A group of us started a community center in Santa Monica. We've tried different programs and three have worked really well. A poetry group. Once a week we visit Venice High and talk to girls at risk.

I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.

I was trained as an actress. But I wasn't a very convincing actress so I started doing punk poetry and then fell into doing stand-up.

You pick up loads of baggage with your first record with reaction to it from fans and critics. So I went to Ireland by myself for a couple of weeks with my guitar. I read lots of poetry I read Patti Smith's autobiography and started words and phrases and then songs started to take shape.

On Memorial Day I don't want to only remember the combatants. There were also those who came out of the trenches as writers and poets who started preaching peace men and women who have made this world a kinder place to live.

Hearing my songs in public freaks me out a bit. There was one restaurant I really liked in L.A. but I had to stop going there when they started playing my music. It felt kinda awkward.

I started writing rhymes first and then put it to the music. I figured out I could lock it to the beat better if I heard the music first. I like to get a lot of tracks put the track up and let the music talk to me about what it's about.

I know that I can sing. That's the reason I started playing music when I was twelve years old.

I'm probably writing music now for the same reason as I started writing songs when I was 14 - to meet women.

I used to go to Bourbon Street when I was a kid and there would be club after club after club of people who were around when the music started. I mean these are legendary maybe not so well known but legendary musicians.

I started getting these attacks in 2009 just as my music career was taking off. I'd be doing photo-shoots and started to feel like I was having heart attacks. Increasingly I found it difficult to step outside my flat. Things started to get better after I saw a therapist who told me I needed to make peace with my panic attacks.

I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself in a sense in the mid 1960s really when I first heard composers like Terry Riley and when I first started playing with tape recorders.

Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music - not like a record that you'd put on which would play for a while and finish.

I started playing piano when I was 6. And I knew that wanted to be involved in that form of expression whether it was through music or acting or dancing or painting or writing.

I think I first realized I wanted to be in country music and be an artist when I was 10. And I started dragging my parents to festivals and fairs and karaoke contests and I did that for about a year before I came to Nashville for the first time. I was 11 and I had this demo CD of me singing Dixie Chicks and Leanne Rimes songs.