On a Friday night, I like to go out because my friends, who have been working normal hours, just want to let go after a stressful week at work.
I receive about 10,000 letters a year from readers, and in the first year after a book is published, perhaps 5,000 letters will deal specifically with that piece of work.
And over the last ten years, after my work with the Brodsky Quartet, I had the opportunity to write arrangements for chamber group, chamber orchestra, jazz orchestra, symphony orchestra even.
The pressure, the heat, the almost impossibly fast pace at which you need work - this is the reality of working in the culinary industry. This is what professional chefs do night after night.
You think you can go into all those auditions not knowing who you are? The work came after I found my sense of self - when I wasn't so manic and desperate.
After my first visit to Japan, in 1960, to work on a joint model building project at Osaka University, I maintained a continuing interest in the country and the entire Far East.
After college, rather than pursue real work, I joined a folk group and sang in coffee houses and nightclubs, an occupation that does little for the intellect and even less for the complexion.
I had always wanted to become a neurologist, which is one of the most demanding vocations in medicine. Where do you stop, after all, with the brain? How does it function? What are its limits? The work seems unending.
I don't want to be Tom Cruise. I'm not after some movie blockbuster career. That's not the kind of work I'm interested in. And frankly, it's not the kind of work I'm ever going to get.
We go through, I think, six different drafts of each script. And then my shooting it is roughly, you know, fifteen percent of the total work that gets done on a show. Then it's all post-production animation after that.
Actually, after while, finding the ideas is the easy part. Sorting them through and turning them into stories, now, that's the hard work.
So I moved to Europe and only came back when directors like Robert Altman would call me after they'd seen my work in Full Metal Jacket.
One of the biggest challenges is for women to find an organization that's willing to accept them back after they leave the work force to raise children without taking a cut in compensation and responsibility.
Rules like 'don't wear white after Labor Day' or 'shoes matching the handbag' are antiquated. Modern women should feel free to experiment.
Fifty years after half a million gypsies were exterminated in the Second World War - thousands of them in Auschwitz - we're again preparing the mass killing of this minority.
What we set out to do was to ensure that this system of fair shares and the planning and controls continued after the war, and when we won, that's what we did.
The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.
The bottom line is that the CIA knew before the war, during and war, and after the war where most of these chemicals were and most of these biological agents.
Personally I believe that the courses we followed for some years after World War II were enlightened, surprisingly imaginative and extremely effective.
After the war, once the bop revolution had taken hold, there were all kinds of young musicians, talented young musicians, who were ready for this fusion of classical and jazz.
After a Polish Pope, whose country was first to be invaded by the Germans in World War Two, we now have someone from the generation drafted at the close of the war.
