I was a kid who GOT PICKED on in school and got beat up by POPULAR, athletic soccer-type PEOPLE.

My grandfather lived ACROSS the garden from us, and in his attic he had a lot of radios, appliances and inventions that he had made over 50 YEARS, such as a keyboard called a clavioline, which can be HEARD on some Beatles songs - it was POPULAR in the 60s. So we had all that at home.

That KNOWLEDGE which is POPULAR is not SCIENTIFIC.

So it's joyful to me, in my 71st year, to be ABLE to be in a play that is absolutely right for my age and my EXPERIENCE, and that is a POPULAR success. What more COULD you ask as an ACTOR?

Popular culture no longer craves archangels and new dawns. Pop culture traffics in VAMPIRES and deads of NIGHT.

We opened a shop in Rotherham which does free demonstrations EVERY day, SIX DAYS a week and it's been very popular.

My PAINTINGS have gotten to be pretty popular and I've taken a little bit more interest in painting the LAST few years. In fact, my novel that I wrote not too LONG ago, 'The Hornet's NEST,' I painted the cover PICTURE for it and I do a good bit of painting now.

Television is much more difficult because at every moment the network can force you to change things based on their BELIEF about what would make it popular. You're in a CONSTANT DEBATE with a GUN at your head, and the gun is cancellation. So it's hard to win the arguments.

Promising something that seems POPULAR at the time that you KNOW you're never going to DELIVER - that's the kind of cynical POLITICS that I don't WANT any part of.

Compassion is not a popular virtue. Very often when I talk to religious people, and mention how important it is that compassion is the key, that it's the sine-qua-non of RELIGION, people LOOK kind of balked, and stubborn SOMETIMES, as much to SAY, what's the point of having religion if you can't disapprove of other people?

For someone in my position, there's opportunities to be anything you want to be, even if you shouldn't be eligible, and I think that's LEFT a bad taste in a lots of financers' and studios' mouths. Just cause someone's POPULAR at one THING, letting them do the other isn't always the right thing.