There is little or no point being chair of the Labour Party and being ignored when engaging with Labour ministers when you're trying to articulate something that affects ordinary people in society.
The trouble is it's very difficult to pin-point the most important thing because Aids affects everyone in different levels of society, differently and you have to respond to it differently.
The point I am making is that in the more primitive forms of society the individual is merely a unit; in more developed forms of society he is an independent personality.
Giving teenagers some inspiration, a single role model and an opportunity to be part of something bigger at a critical point in their lives can be the difference between being a productive or being a destructive member of society.
Our society has gotten to the point where we might soon become less and less shocked by any kind of violence.
Of course, sometimes when you write personally, you are also writing about society, obliquely reflecting topical issues, but not in a way that people would expect you to or in the way that someone trying to make a point would.
Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
I love milk so much! I make a point of drinking a glass of milk every day. So now anyone who did those milk ads with the milk mustaches, they're my heroes.
I love it when a man cooks; it's one of those points that makes me adore a guy. I think it's so romantic and I feel cared for when a man cooks.
I thought my character definitely was very much in love with him and wanted to be with him, but I think at some point they were going to have to draw the line.
I was in love with this character of Ray Krebbs. I wanted the part badly. I had done several Western films in my career at that point and there wasn't much opportunity then to play Western roles on television at that time.
For me, Islam is a moral reference point, a source of inspiration to work collectively with people, to love people and to help them, to concentrate on universal values of mercy, co-operation and tolerance.
I'm like, over love. Crush, smush. I can't. I'm giving up on love at this point. I'm hoping for a crush. Actually, no. I don't want a crush. I want someone to crush on me.
Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.
With the Stray Cats at least, we really took the music somewhere else. First, we wrote our own songs. That's a real weak point in modern classics if you do rockabilly or blues.
I can sing very comfortably from my vantage point because a lot of the music was about a loss of innocence, there's innocence contained in you but there's also innocence in the process of being lost.
Most often the music does end up in the movie, and sometimes there's a point where I wish that it wasn't, just because I think the score would be more effective if there was less of it. But, again, that's not my call.
It's so easy for anyone to deal with their own guilt of being a middle-class white music fan by pointing to other people who they perceive to be richer than them, whiter than them.
As an artist, you dream about accumulating enough successful music to someday do just one greatest-hits album, but to reach the point where you're releasing your second collection of hits is beyond belief.
If you don't know the blues... there's no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll or any other form of popular music.
I listen to a variety of music. The only common point is strong lyrics; I'm more obsessed with lyrics than music. I need to hear a form of truth, and if it's a hard truth, even better.
