The avant-garde theater is fun; it is free-swinging, bold, iconoclastic, and often wildly, wildly funny. If you will approach it with childlike innocence - putting your standard responses aside, for they do not apply - if you will approach it on its own terms, I think you will be in for a liberating surprise.

When I talk of primordial innocence, I hear it in Sufi music with the nay flute. I see it in Coptic icons, in most traditional art, particularly art of the American Indian. I find the texts extraordinarily beautiful and very childlike and very simple. I've been particularly interested in American Indian texts.

It is easy to bare your body, but it is difficult to bare your soul. What works for me is that I am not a city-raised boy with city-raised sensibilities. I can play the vulnerable tough man, the guy with a gun in his hand, tears in his eyes, fire in his heart, innocence in him, and in his arms a woman he loves.

I feel almost as if I had been born in a vacuum of innocence, and then had to come to terms with the fact that actually, I was born into the middle of history - the rather grimy normality of the 70s, which did, indeed, retain some traces of human innocence, but were also girded about by the demons of experience.

In the two-room flat where I live in Japan, I try to take time every day to step away from the bombardment of e-mails and opportunities and papers around my desk, for an hour, and just sit on our 30-inch terrace in the sun, reading something sustaining, whether 'The Age of Innocence' or the latest by Colm Toibin.

No sense in no sense innocence of what of not and what of delight. In no sense innocence in no sense and what in delight and not, in no sense innocence in no sense no sense what, in no sense and delight, and in no sense and delight and not in no sense and delight and not, no sense in no sense innocence and delight.

People might think I'm very hard, what with my black make-up, my hair over my eyes, etc. My innocence didn't always help me, but it did preserve something in me that maybe others don't have anymore. I'm inside my bubble, you could say, and thankfully so, because I don't think daily life is always great. It protects me.

Truth cannot be defined, although it can certainly be experienced. But experience is not a definition. A definition is made by the mind, experience comes through participating. If somebody asks, "What is a dance?" how can you define it? But you can dance and you can know the inner feel of it. God is the ultimate dance.

I just feel like every kid is growing up too fast and they're seeing too much. Everything is about sex, and that's fine for me. I'm not saying I don't like it. But I don't think it should be everywhere, where kids are exposed to everything sexual. Because they have to have some innocence; there's just no innocence left.

Be ever watchful for the opportunity to shelter little children with the umbrella of your charity; be generous to their schools, their hospitals, and their places of worship. For, as they must bear the burdens of our mistakes, so are they in their innocence the repositories of our hopes for the upward progress of humanity.

The thing that's really cool for me about Miami Beach is you have this dichotomy between sunlight and family and happiness and innocence and then at night, darker, stranger mob conspiracy stuff sort of comes out. It seems like a storytelling engine. You can just keep writing about how those two worlds smash into each other.

My stepmother appeared when I was about 9. My brother was sent off to an institute in Scotland & my sister & I were sent to school. As my stepmother's ideas were then wholly Quaker, mixed with a naive & charming innocence & a little snobbery, it was one dotty epoch on top of another. I always remained terrified of my father.

I don't think the law exists to arrive at the truth. If it did, we wouldn't have exclusionary rules, we wouldn't have presumptions of innocence, we wouldn't have proof beyond reasonable doubt. There's an enormous difference between the role of truth in law and the role of truth in science. In law, truth is one among many goals.

The thing I deplore the most is, anyone who rapes anyone's innocence, in anyway. So a guy who physically rapes a woman or a child or physically hits a child. When that period of innocence is raped - that person loses something that they can never get it back. To me when innocence is raped, that is the sickest and filthiest thing.

For that purpose Christ instituted holy baptism, thereby to clothe you with his righteousness. It is tantamount to his saying, My righteousness shall be your righteousness; my innocence, your innocence. Your sins indeed are great, but by baptism I bestow on you my righteousness; I strip death from you and clothe you with my life.

With Bill Clinton, his lawyers always wanted him to say nothing about the Lewinsky scandal. Defendant Clinton had the right to remain silent. But President Clinton had a completely different need - political survival. That meant, in the end, that he needed to trumpet his supposed innocence and talk publicly to the American people.

To cut short the question of the law of retaliation, we must note that even in its primitive form it can operate only between two individuals of whom one is absolutely innocent, and the other absolutely guilty. The victim, to be sure, is innocent. But can the society that is supposed to represent the victim lay claim to innocence?

One day, at my office, I wrote down some names and dates and notes, and I wrote a title, 'The Age of Despair,' and then some other 'Ages' - Innocence, God, Reason, Hope - and I wrote this as well: 'Woman, born in 1930, lives till the age of 80 or so, suffers depression, marries a car dealer, has children who grow up to confuse her.'

When I started off in music, I started with a real innocence, a real love for the instrument, the writing the songs, the playing the songs and the sharing and the recording and experimenting. It was exciting. Then, this thing called success came, and something happened at some point where I became disenchanted, and I lost the innocence.

To the former child migrants, who came to Australia from a home far away, led to believe this land would be a new beginning, when only to find it was not a beginning, but an end, an end of innocence - we apologise and we are sorry. To the mothers who lost the maternal right to love and care for their child - we apologise, and we are sorry.

So many times I've photographed stories that show the degradation of the planet. I had one idea to go and photograph the factories that were polluting, and to see all the deposits of garbage. But, in the end, I thought the only way to give us an incentive, to bring hope, is to show the pictures of the pristine planet - to see the innocence.

When I started, there was something almost romantic about the notion of paparazzi. I mean, it wasn't. They were still chasing you down the road. But that guy had to put film in his camera and work out whether it was worth pressing the button to take the shot, otherwise he's got to stop and change the film. So it was like this age of innocence.

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