Back when I was 8 or 9 and wanted to be a nun, I would often stop at church on my way home from school.

I went to Catholic school and experienced racism firsthand from nuns and priests.

Gun rights advocates - many whom also believe that the US constitution is divinely inspired and that the rights it enumerates are God-given - face a conundrum. Their very insistence that the government not restrict guns in public spaces or limit their sales in any way also obviously inhibit other Americans' rights as covered by the US constitution.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

I used to like Mukeshji very much because his Hindi was excellent. It was very clear, and his pronunciation was excellent. No one could match that.

This is the conundrum of the present regimes in the Arab world. They still want to control youth; they want to be in control as they did in the 1950s and '60s. But that doesn't work anymore. Now with just a Wi-Fi link, you can understand what's happening in the world.

Renunciation - that is the great fact we all, individuals and classes, have to learn. In trying to avoid it we bring misery to ourselves and others.

At the heart of 'The Famished Road' is a philosophical conundrum - for me, an essential one: what is reality? Everybody's reality is subjective; it's conditioned by upbringing, ideas, temperament, religion, what's happened to you.

That's the conundrum of cartoon stripping, as opposed to political cartoons. When your anger is the driving force of your drawing hand, failure follows. The anger is OK, but it has to serve the interests of the heart, frankly.

The picture of Mother Teresa that I remember from my childhood is of a short, sari-wearing woman scurrying down a red gravel path between manicured lawns. She would have in tow one or two slower-footed, sari-clad young Indian nuns. We thought her a freak. Probably we'd picked up on unvoiced opinions of our Loreto nuns.

Growing up in an old-fashioned Bengali Hindu family and going to a convent school run by stern Irish nuns, I was brought up to revere rules. Without rules, there was only anarchy.

All of us kids ended up 'doing Mom.' There are four of us who've tried show business. Five if you insist on counting my sister the nun, who does liturgical dance.

I came up with the idea of a daredevil who's going to go upside down, in a metal car, at 90 mph, and it's never been done before. I get into this metal car, I'm strapped in. You pull back, and it's a roller coaster at Magic Mountain, with kids and nuns and everything else! I pass out while everybody else is having a wonderful time.

I deal with first-hand sources. And give the people, even John Sununu, the opportunity to respond to what I've been told by first-hand sources.

I was a class clown; the nuns didn't like that.

My father is from North Carolina, and he got rid of his drawl really fast. He's very much about speaking correctly, enunciating in certain ways.

I'll be a nun, raise my daughter, and make albums.

In the third grade, a nun stuffed me in a garbage can under her desk because she said that's where I belonged. I also had the distinction of being the only altar boy knocked down by a priest during mass.

When I was a kid, a pickleball hit me in the back of the head, and I had memory problems. I was in a boarding school and the nuns gave me poems to remember to try and get the memory going again.

I'm proud of the fact that I've taken a lot of big directors, such as Trevor Nunn and Nick Hytner, who were musical virgins, and introduced them to the form.

Literature is the denunciation of the times in which one lives.

Our culture is so inundated with Freudian prototypes, and I think that 'Twin Peaks' came up with a whole new Pandora's Box of outlandishly mental, out of balance people that have never been described or have been noted by the psychiatric community.

I got kicked out of Catholic school, by the way, because I was too feminine. I was too feminine and I had a crush on this boy named Anthony and the nuns were not having it.

Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.

Monica Besra, a Bengali woman from a remote Indian village, was reportedly suffering from a malignant ovarian tumor when she went, in 1998, to a hospice founded by Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity. Nuns at the mission reportedly placed a medallion with Teresa's image on Besra's abdomen, and the tumor disappeared.

In my youngest days, the nuns at my grammar school drummed into us that we were in this world to make it a better place - not just for ourselves, but for other people, too. So from the very beginning, I've been driven by this idea that we have to make a difference, and it's one of the reasons I went into law in the first place.

I don't think people will ever forget I was an 'Angel', anymore than they'll forget Sally Field was 'The Flying Nun.'

Art is a subject that is inundated with opinions. In fact, that's all it is about is opinions.

I remember one time when all the nuns in my Catholic grade school got around in a semicircle, me and Mom in the middle, and they said, 'Mrs. Farley, the children at school are laughing at Christopher, not with him.' I thought, 'Who cares? As long as they're laughing.'

Participatory democracies. Open economies. Web-based communication. All American innovations to the great conundrums of the globe.

I am beyond blessed and humbled to be named the Paul Hornung Award winner.