When you're around enormously successful people you realise their success isn't an accident - it's about work.
At the time it seemed like a natural development of my interest in what was going on around me in society.
When I first came to Los Angeles, I was a teacher in Compton. I know how in need schools are around the country.
There are certain cities around the world where it's possible to learn about tomorrow's technology as it's being developed today.
Elephants love to play around. They are very intelligent animals. They have a strong bond, at times stretching to several decades, with their mahouts.
Love is all around us all the time. Love is the ethers that we swim in. Love is the amniotic fluid of the soul.
I love being around people who care about me, and I care about them.
I love doing short films because they're much more intimate and there's far less waiting around than on the bigger films.
I love just walking around New York. It's like a whole world in one place.
I love living with animals. And my children love animals. I love walking around and being with the horses. But the deer? They're naughty.
I knew that love was around. I truly believe my mother loved me. But feeling it all the time? I didn't.
Music is a nice friend to have around, whether it is just for yourself or for other people. If you can enjoy it, being professional is almost secondary.
House music originated in America, and it has always been around, but I guess it just got a tighter hold on Europe and other parts of the world.
People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around - the music and the ideas.
Quite frankly, I've always listened to the black side of the radio dial. Where I grew up, there was a lot of it and there was a lot of live music around.
The iPod made music mobile, but today, how many devices do you need to walk around with? You want it on just one. And inevitably that's going to be the phone.
Music is a powerful tool in galvanizing people around an issue. There's no better way to get your point across than to put it in a beautiful song.
But I've been freestyling and messing around with rhyming since I was 13. That's when I really started listening to hip-hop music.
There was always a lot of American music in England until, obviously when the Beatles came around, then there was a shift towards English music, but before then American music was the main thing.
You have to react to what's around you in the moment, whatever the music is. Just think of it as some place you have to enter and you need to find the key.
I had piano lessons at five and started guitar at ten, but although music and acting was always around me, my parents never pressured me into it.
