Art is something out of the ordinary commenting on the ordinary.

America is still a frontier country of wide open spaces. Our closeness to nature is one reason why our problem is not repression but regression; our notorious violence is the constant eruption of primi-tiveness, of anarchic individualism.

How many modern transsexuals are unacknowledged shamans? Perhaps it is to poets they should go for counsel, rather than surgeons.

Hollywood movies of the Fifties, like The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, with their epic clash of pagan and Judeo-Christian cultures, tell more about art and society than the French-infatuated ideologues who have made a travesty of the "best" American higher criticism.

My generation of bossy, confident, baby-boom women were something brand new in history. Our energy and assertiveness weren't created by Betty Friedan, unknown before her 1963 book, or by Gloria Steinem, whose political activism, as even the Lifetime profile admitted, did not begin until 1969.

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers.

All great stars are competitive. That's a sign of a true artist - if you don't have the fire of competition deep down inside, you're never going to achieve anything. You have to want to be king of the heap.