A cigarette in the hands of a Hollywood star onscreen is a gun aimed at a 12- or 14-year-old.

The charm of smoking a cigarette from the point of view of the people who smoked them, and I was one of those people for many, many years, is an amazing pleasure and a hit that some people say, and I've never done heroin, but some people say that it rivals the heroin hit, so there is that pleasure. The-it kills you the same way that heroin kills you.

Every time I flicked channels, there I was, talking. I was talking too much and writing too little. So Naomi and I went to Hawaii. The phone was cut off and we lost touch. This gave me the chance to have a good think about my life.

Politics has become entertainment.

All has changed, thanks to Joe Eszterhas' life-threatening battle with throat cancer. He announced in "The New York Times" that he and Hollywood had blood on their hands and now Eszterhas is crusading to stop Hollywood's glamorization of smoking.

Meanwhile, politics is about getting a candidate in front of the public as a star, politics as rock'n'roll, politics as a movie.

Joe Lieberman frightens me. Why should we, an Hollywood voter, donate money to a man who threatens our creative freedom, our freedom of expression.