Throughout my career, from Jamaica to Nigeria, Pakistan to Switzerland, I've learned that effective diplomacy means more than shaking hands and staging photo ops. It means developing real, robust relationships. It means finding common ground and managing points of differentiation. It means doing genuine, old-fashioned, people-to-people diplomacy.

To have the athletes weigh in on a stage, televised, it makes no sense. Holding us at weight to run us through medicals and a staging process, it lengthens the time we're depleting ourselves.

The great thing about working in comics is that visually, you're the sole voice. You have to figure out the staging, the lighting, the composition, the character emotions, the action. You get a script, but you're trying to work it out in individual panels. It's a terrific exercise in creative thinking and creative problem-solving.

Directors sometimes have good ideas that I wished I'd had, not on rewriting but simply on staging.

Religion is close to theatre; much of its power comes from the effects of staging and framing.

2012 has been an extraordinary year for our country. We cheered our Queen to the rafters with the Jubilee, showed the world what we're made of by staging the most spectacular Olympic and Paralympic Games ever and - let's not forget - punched way above our weight in the medals table.

People now know of the word intervention and think they understand what it means, but more often than not they go about intervening the wrong way. I see people staging things on their own. But discussing the nature of somebody's condition over breakfast isn't an intervention.

It's great when it all comes together in a great musical like 'Sweeney Todd,' when Stephen Sondheim writes songs from heaven, the book is good and the staging is good. But it's very rare when that happens.

People think, 'Oh, you're doing 'The Wiz' because 'Empire' is such a big hit.' The truth is, staging this musical has been a dream of ours since the '90s, but the rights were tied up. It's just coincidental that, this year, when we were choosing a new musical, the rights were cleared.

I was never really interested in an operatic post, but I took on the Bastille because it seemed a unique opportunity to build an opera ensemble from scratch, and to deal with all the disciplines that go into opera - the music, the staging and the singing - in an interrelated way.

There are some sequences in films that I think work filmicly, that stand out to me, but that's much more to do with the staging and the cutting and the mood of the thing as a sequence, the way everything comes together.

I'd really been interested in opera when I was about 16, and I really like staging them.

I enjoyed doing the gag covers better than the story ones because they were usually simpler. A cover based on an incident in the plot took a great deal of staging to tell a little story that was still part of the book. And it had to make sense on its own.

There have been moments when I was physically strained, but I have overcome the hardships by staging performances and receiving support from our members and fans.

I played Shylock in my school's staging of 'Merchant of Venice.'

Staging any play is very exposing because, if you are going to do it well, you have to put so much of yourself into it.

Canada has become such a staging area for Chinese money.

Staging Formula One is incredibly expensive.

As for radio and movies, I like the movies better, although the work is much harder. The cinema has microphone technique, staging, and glamour all wrapped up into one.

I love staging action and wide-shots, not necessarily going to close-ups.