There are no heroes in most of my stories. I look at our society with a critical eye and find nothing extraordinary in the people I see.

Winning Nobel imposed on me a lifestyle to which I am not used and which I would not have preferred.

I believe society has a right to defend itself, just as the individual has the right to attack that with which he disagrees.

As the tension eases, we must look in the direction of agriculture, industry and education as our final goals, and toward democracy under Mr Mubarak.

I was at Disney for about four years, so I made good friends there. It was a time of not a lot of creativity. It was the end of the first great era, with a few of the original animators. They called them the Nine Old Men. I learned a lot from them, but it wasn't going to be a future home for me.

You had to be there at the time to understand the wild creative energy of the Fab Four, and this contains forays into Indian music as well as classics such as 'When I'm Sixty-Four.'

Austin is a big music town, so growing up, I had a lot of local heroes. Toni Price I was very, very into; she was one of the first people I tried to emulate. She's a local Austin blues artist. Marsha Paul I was also a very big fan of.

I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals' imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.