In the world of energy politics, the sudden vanishing of the word 'coal' is a remarkable and unprecedented event.
I am an outsider looking in, absolutely. You're not going to see me at the Academy Awards 'Vanity Fair' party any time soon. I'm not somebody who, no matter where I go, there are paparazzi or any of that nonsense. But I have a little window into that world, and I can enter it and dance around. I want to be the audience's ticket into the party.
My greatest desire is that the hope that has overcome fear in my country will help vanquish it around the world.
My vantage point on the world is the operating room where I see my patients.
I think voters want somebody who understands their problems. You're right that they don't expect the president to fix everything. When he's wrestling with Congress and Wall Street and the rest of the world, they hope he'll be looking at things from their vantage point.
I wanted to be an actor from a young age, but actually becoming one and seen the ugly side of the world does feel different and sometimes unwelcome. There are shallow, vapid, untalented people zombieing the streets of Hollywood, adding decadence and immorality to an already extravagant business.
As a child, I was fascinated by any branch of physical or biological science. Even today, I find great excitement in discovering the complexity and variability of the world we live in, getting a glimpse into the deeper reality that we mostly ignore in our everyday human activities.
Abstraction brings the world into more complex, variable relations; it can extract beauty, alternative topographies, ugliness, and intense actualities from seeming nothingness.
The reality is, risk is variable. Those in the financial world know it.
When the Internet publicity began, I remember being struck by how much the world was not the way we thought it was, that there was infinite variation in how people viewed the world.
When I'm writing, I write all day. Other days, I sit around thinking. Or I run around from one meeting to another, out in the world. It varies, and I like that.
We are great believers in the idea that the Internet can help bring justice, but justice varies from place to place across the world.
Since the early '80s, I've found myself in war zones in various parts of the world.
You then get into a period a few years ago, where a lot of external factors that we didn't have anything to do with did hit, and some of them at the same time... devaluations, weak economies, you name it, in various parts of the world.
China also has moved away from its original status of purely producing basic, what you call, consumer commodities and Chinese companies are moving beyond China to various parts of the world.
Watching the economies in various parts of the world, I believe that there is scope for improvement everywhere. There is some corruption and inefficiency everywhere.
We can self-censor ourselves for various reasons, but we can't live in a world where some person or some group decides what's offensive and what's not.
Being an American is life-threatening. For various reasons, men and women here don't live as long as men and women in about two dozen other countries, including the ones we defeated in World War II - Japan, Germany and Italy.
The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.
The auditory perception is not sufficient for our knowledge of the world; it does not have vastness.
