At the height of his popularity in 1977, Cat Stevens converted to Islam and dedicated his life to educational and philanthropic causes.
Life on our planet has been a constant series of cataclysmic events, and we are more suitable for extinction than a trilobite or a reptile. So we will vanish. There's no doubt in my heart.
It was quite a European war until 1917, when the Americans joined up. They don't have the same sense of the loss of innocence and the cataclysmic loss of life. A whole generation was wiped out.
'I Will Not Be Broken' has really become very healing for me. Any time you go through a cataclysmic event... it's going to inform the richness that you sing from... The experiences of life make all your emotions, I think, deeper.
As a kid I'd lie awake at night and convince myself that a meteor was about to hit the Earth. It's my fatalistic streak, which I've inherited from my mum. I firmly believe something cataclysmic is going to happen in my lifetime and I have to be prepared to run for my life when the time comes.
Of course, it's a dream to go to Mars. I want to find out whether there was life there or not. And if there was, then why did it die out? What sort of catastrophe happened?
I've been to enough other countries in the world to know what happens when you have socialized single-payer health care. It works. People don't get sick as much. They don't lose their life savings with a catastrophic illness like cancer or AIDS.
Because we make ourselves deaf to feedback, because we overestimate our abilities, because we become consumed with ourselves, we end up subjecting ourselves not just to the inevitable stumbles or difficulties of life but catastrophic, painful failures.
I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catcher's mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back.
The forbidden things were a great influence on my life. I was forbidden from reading A Catcher in the Rye.
'Catcher in the Rye' changed my life when I was a kid. I read it as I was a boy turning into a man, and I was so fascinated by the values. I believe in it.
I never show my books to Ricky. His writing is very different, and anyway, he's only read one novel in his life: 'The Catcher in the Rye.'
Any book that can help you survive the slings and arrows of adolescence is a book to love for life; 'The Catcher in the Rye' did just that, and I still do love it.
It's a wonderful metaphor, catching a wave, for how you can look at other challenges in your life.
There's a style in modern dance right now called Release Technique. It's based on a feeling of falling and catching yourself, and I thought it was such a good metaphor for the way life feels.
There's to be a film about my life. I can give this as an exclusive now. Meryl Streep was offered the part but, no, I wanted Kate Winslet. Kylie Minogue is playing me in middle age. In old age, I'm not sure who's going to play me. I haven't got there yet. Perhaps Cate Blanchett. Or Jacki Weaver.
Secularism is categorically not saying that the religious may not speak out publicly or have a say in public life. It is about saying that religion alone should not confer a privileged say in public life, or greater influence on it. It really is as simple as that.
What I can say, categorically, is that working with Sarah Paulson and Kathy Bates will have been the most formative experience for me, as an actor, for the rest of my life.
I categorically resist this idea that films are supposed to be autobiographical and the only stories you tell are about your own life.
'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.
