I'm an independent thinker and independent leader. I have been my whole life.
Aviation - and space travel, in particular - have always been especially captivating.
Graffiti's always been a temporary art form. You make your mark and then they scrub it off.
I might have been just as happy to have been a practicing primary-care doctor. But as a medical student, I had interacted with patients suffering from neurodegeneration or acute clinical schizophrenia. It left an indelible mark on my memory.
I've always been interested in public health approaches because it seems to me we have this yearning for silver bullets, and that is not in fact how change comes about. Change comes through silver buckshot - a lot of little things that achieve results. That's a classic public health approach.
I'm immensely proud to have been made a CBE, but I don't ever use the letters after my name unless someone has included them in correspondence.
I'm sure I would have been considered a more significant artist if I was a singer-songwriter. It's just not the way I roll. I love being a curator and a musicologist. People write me letters and thank me for turning them on to Fred McDowell and Sippie Wallace, and that's partly my job this time around.
I had begun reading earlier than most because my sister Emmy Lou, no doubt to keep me from bothering her, decided it was easier to teach me to read stories to myself rather than to read them to me, as she had been doing.
I've been fortunate in life to benefit from family, educators, work colleagues, and a set of mentors and sponsors, all of whom did not hesitate to offer and support me with every opportunity to achieve what I set out to do.
As a general thing, I've always been drawn to characters who appear to be one thing on the surface, but are actually something else underneath.
And the funny thing is, I've always been an optimist - it's practically a congenital disorder with me.
I don't think that there's been one example in history where somebody has openly talked about their personal life and it's done them any good.
I've been asked to do various types of cruises.
To prevent the theft of 'Ben-Hur's sets, guards were prowling the back lot long after production had been shut down.
I may have been lucky with some sort of intuition, but I believe in training a great deal.
My ambition has always been to work with English and American actors and directors. Those were the movies that I was watching when I was growing up.
My Dad is my hero. He's 85 now and he is in great health. He is handsome and strong. He has an incredible moral and ethical backbone. I couldn't have been luckier with my parents.
At the time of the Civil War, there were six democracies in the face of the planet. Today, there's 120 and they've been inspired by the American exceptionalism.
For me, acting has often been solitary. You're all together, and then boom, you're gone.
When I was growing up, I, like many Jews, cheered what appeared to be the receding of faith from everyday life. The further religion got from our lives the better our lives would get, I thought, because persecution had been such a burden to Jewish families for generations.
Chanel has always been this big thing for me - there are baby pictures of me wearing my mom's Chanel pumps.
I've always been comfortable in my own skin - sometimes a little too comfortable, which in turn makes other people uncomfortable.
I'd been writing stories since I was a child. I wrote little books for my mom and bound them myself with needle and thread. Mostly, they were about my pets.
I've always been interested in listening to people's stories.
Nancy was a very special person, too beautiful for this world. I feel so privileged to have loved her and been loved by her.
I'm in a monogamous relationship and have been for many, many years. I think it's a choice. I don't think you can generalize, though, and what works for me may not work for other people, but I don't think everybody cheats. We're all different.
There's been an increase in the number of Iraqis in training, but more Americans are dying and violence is increasing.
You can't stop wars to build tertiary teaching hospitals, but you can say, 'Let's stop for a couple of days to immunise the kids.' It has been done.
I've found in the past that the more closely I identify with the heroine, the less completely she emerges as a person. So from the first novel I've been learning techniques to distance myself from the characters so that they are not me and I don't try to protect them in ways that aren't good for the story.
I've always been a bit of an orphan, because actors say, 'Well, he's more of a dancer.' And dancers say, 'No. He's really a singer.' And singers say, 'No. He's an actor.'
I'm honoured to have been selected to be the Labour candidate for Manchester Central.
The men who have furnished me with my greatest inspiration have not been men of wealth, but men of deeds.
I've been invited to the Grammys with other friends who were nominated. I'm like, 'Naw, I'm not gonna go until it's my time.' And who knew it was gonna be, like, the next year? It's crazy.
I've always been fond of the glam-rocker title.
I love New Orleans. I love jazz. I grew up practicing jazz piano, and that's just been such a cool genre to me. There's a lot of talent there.
I feel like I've been fortunate enough that I've gotten to meet and work with some really passionate people.
