To have the kind of year you want to have something has to happen that you can't explain why it happened. Something has to happen that you can't coach.

It happened in Miami in Coral Gables a great big ol' Cuban wedding. It was pretty intense.

That sense of what happened in Europe in World War II has shaped a lot of my views.

What happened in America in the 1860s was a war of secession a war of independence no different in principle from what happened in America in the 1770s and 1780s.

After every major conflict - World War I World War II Korea Vietnam the fall of the Soviet Union - what happened was that we ultimately hollowed out the force largely by doing deep across-the-board cuts.

My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories - not so many but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then to my father's generation. It's a kind of inheritance the memory of it.

In the months leading up to World War II there was a tendency among many Americans to talk absently about the trouble in Europe. Nothing that happened an ocean away seemed very threatening.

I was going to be a great woman novelist. Then the war came along and I think it's hard for young people today don't you to realize that when World War II happened we were dying to go and help our country.

I saw what happened when a dictator was allowed to take over a piece of a country and the country went down the tubes. And I saw the opposite during the war when America joined the fight.

We have been terrorised by what happened in America and we express our condolences to the American people who suffered from this unexpected catastrophe and a new world war.

All this happened more or less. The war parts anyway are pretty much true.

Think of what happened after 9/11 the minute before there was any assessment there was glee in the administration because now we can invade Iraq and so the war drums beat.

But if you want to know the truth the weirdest thing that has happened has been my discovery that people who attend the conventions are filled with love.

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

I plays Joe's best friend. I am the only one he has ever been able to trust in his life so I help him understand what happened to him when he was younger.

What has happened to the good old-fashioned travel agent? I want to go to a really posh travel agent and have them organise everything for me. I don't want to do things on the Internet.

From a technical point of view there seemed to me to be absolutely no reason why - with the existing technology - we couldn't do very high quality audio because whereas the boom in digital graphics is ongoing the boom in digital audio has already happened.

Without competition the spectacular development of technology that we have seen in the last one hundred years in this country would not have happened.

Today 80 percent of all the oil that comes out of the Gulf is from 1 000 feet or more and today almost a third of it is more than 5 000 feet below the surface. What hasn't happened is the safety and the ability to respond to a negative event such as this blowout has been far outrun by the technology of drilling itself. We need to close that gap.

Now a lot of what we are doing right now quite frankly is because of what happened on Christmas. Many of the things were kind of in the works. We were already planning for example the purchase and deployment of advanced imaging technology. You call them body scanners. We call them AITs (Advanced Imaging Technologies).

What's happened with computer technology is perfectly timed for someone with my set of skills. I tell stories with pictures. What I love about CGI is that if I can think it it can be put on the screen.

My father also happened to be an intellectual as learned literate informed and curious as anyone I have known. Unobtrusively and casually he was my wise and gentle teacher.

There happened to be guitar classes at the college and there was a guitar teacher there with whom I used to play. In addition I also would go out into country schools and teach little kids basic guitar and singing a few times a week.

My first acting job happened by accident when I was really young. I was in fifth grade and my teacher saw an ad in the paper and took me to the audition after school and I got the part.