People are starting to know more about it, but I was blown away by Almaty, Kazakhstan. It's like a future Swiss Alps. It has the potential to be an extraordinary ski resort. It is a city with beautiful mountain scapes.
The American model was celebrated by Thatcherites and New Labour alike, California worshipped as the model of the future, 'Anglo-Saxon' embalmed as the fitting metaphor for the shared Anglo-American legacy, Europe denigrated and the rest of the world...
The subject of criminal rehabilitation was debated recently in City Hall. It's an appropriate place for this kind of discussion because the city has always employed so many ex-cons and future cons.
Putting even one thing in your shopping basket that's locally produced or organic makes all the difference. It's a vote for the future, for animal welfare, for the environment, for your children's children.
As the fashion carousel spins ever faster, the concern is that, while the stream of newness never runs out, there's going to be a good deal more crash and burn among designers in the future.
The stability and security of authoritarian regimes cannot create but terrorism and violence and destruction. Let us accept the choice of the people. Let us not pick and choose who we would like to rule their future.
When I have had a long day at work, I want something to watch that is funny, lighthearted and easy to get into, and reality is that. I'm not really into serious programmes or documentaries.
I've been invited to appear on Letterman, but they wanted me to talk about a funny videotape of Congress. 'Bring us your outtakes!' That's not our job.
I've had countless reviews sort that have made me cry. It's funny, it doesn't ever get better either; you can't turn your ears off.
A funny thing about near-future stories: the future catches up to them. If the author is unlucky, the future catches up faster than the book can get out the door.
Shakespeare wrote great plays that we're still watching all these years later. Charlie Chaplin made great comedies and they are still as funny today as they ever were.
Being a humorist is not a voluntary thing. You can tell this because in a situation where saying a funny thing will cause a lot of trouble, a humorist will still say the funny thing. No matter how inappropriate.
It's still funny for me to think of myself as someone who writes historical fiction because it seems like a really fusty, musty term, and yet it clearly applies.
Politicians read the polls that show 85 or 90 percent of the voters profess a belief in God, so they identify themselves with religion, often only to the degree necessary to reach the constituency they are targeting.
Although oil is a commodity, it's still not a commodity like coffee, which, thank God, we will have with us always. At some point the oil will run out.
In sports teams, apart from talk of sporting prowess and the imparting of inspirational thought, an extraordinary amount of time is spent discussing, and flaunting, material possessions.
Barack Obama's inspirational whoosh to the presidency in 2008 was unusual. Most campaigns are less exhilarating; indeed, they are downright disappointing - until someone wins.
Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.
It's as if inside the White House the belief in Obama's inspirational charisma is still such that every time the ugliness of brute politics intrudes, it's a startling revelation.
I'm much better informed than Mr. Clarke ever was about the nature of the intelligence that was available again Osama bin Laden and which was consistently denigrated by himself and Mr. Tenet.
I would rather drudge out my life on a cotton plantation, till the grave opened to give me rest, than to live with an unprincipled master and a jealous mistress.
