I think that the Internet - and I do love the free flow of ideas on the 'Net - is like the wild west of the information world.

America had, for one thing, lived in anarchy for - until much more recently than Europe. We had the Wild West, where the cliche of the cowboy movies was the nearest sheriff is 90 miles away, and so you had to pack a gun and defend yourself.

There is no winning or losing, but rather the value is in the experience of imagining yourself as a character in whatever genre you're involved in, whether it's a fantasy game, the Wild West, secret agents or whatever else. You get to sort of vicariously experience those things.

The time I spent working in the wild west show in Paris had a pretty big impact on me. A friend of mine had hooked me up with the gig over there and I literally left Texas with a hundred dollar bill in my pocket and one way plane ticket to Paris.

Being on a grand jury felt like attending a series of hangings in a legal Wild West. Hands up for a true bill. Hands up for a dismissal. A show of hands to save a life, or to end it.

My dad grew up in western Nebraska. I'd visit all the time as a kid, and it's very much like the Wild West. It felt to me like a cowboy movie. Stuff like that made me become this dreamer at a young age.

For many years, when people described how the Internet worked - whether they were talking about shopping, communicating, or starting a business there - they inevitably invoked a single metaphor. The Internet, said just about everybody, was a contemporary incarnation of the wild, wild West.

The Internet is the Wild West of the world, where anybody can throw anything down. Everything can be as relevant as the next thing; it doesn't matter who posts it. In that environment, the Critics' Choice is still very important.

The computer environment is radically different today. In the 1980s, it was like the Wild West, with a lot of open territory. Now, the cowboys have moved out and the farmers have moved in.

The thought for a long time was that banks needed to be too controlled, too regulated to be turned over to the Wild West of the Net. Then the credit meltdown hit, and we saw just how reckless these so-called safe and regulated institutions were.

It's been a great place to get in touch with what people are really thinking. And to make contact with readers and other writers. Egalitarian, wide open, like the Wild West!

The Wild West attracts cowboys. A sheriff is a good thing.

There were terrific shows on TV like 'Star Trek' and 'Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea' and 'Wild Wild West.' All us kids would watch them. We would act them out in the basement. I think I found that I could speak a bit more clearly when I was playing with other people.

I was a little bit shocked at quite how football was more like the wild west.

El Paso is the final Wild, Wild West city.

Schmoozers are brownnosers, sycophants more suited to middle management than to the Wild West of the entrepreneurial world.

I write about times and places I would visit in a time machine, like ancient Rome or the Wild West.

I think as far as the music industry is concerned, it's kind of been the wild, wild West in a way with the Internet, which is not necessarily a bad thing to me.

I was weaned not on television or Wild West sagas but on stories of nationalism and patriotism. I would sit at my mother's feet by the hour and drink in these exciting tales of the freedom fighters in our family.

Britain and the US remain the Wild West for ideas, where pioneers push each other towards ever greater heights in the white heat of free enterprise. No one knows their place, no one fears failure and no one is ashamed of success.