I feel it's part of my job to make the problems of the poor compelling.
Some people talk about Haiti as being the graveyard of development projects.
Barriers were being torn down. Where Freddie Mercury was trying to keep his homosexuality from the front pages, Boy George was openly & outrageously gay.
I've also been working with the Challengers Club in the inner city of Los Angeles for 15 years now, I guess, and it's essentially an inner-city recreation club for boys and girls.
About guns, about hunting, it's safe to say I know nothing. The last gun I fired was a musket at Boy Scout camp.
I began as a boy with artistic talent... as a visual artist... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature.
Mutual funds give people the sense that they're investing with the big boys and that they're really not at a disadvantage entering the stock market.
Saying that you are moral because you believe in a god is like saying you are an economist because you play monopoly.
I am only 8 years old, I told myself. No little boy of 8 has ever murdered anyone. It's not possible.
There are examples of ex-presidents speaking out. Jimmy Carter has not held back on a variety of issues. Harry Truman didn't.
How different our national perspective would be had Johnson, rather than Nixon, served from 1969 to 1973.
Despite its flaws, the American electoral system has produced Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, and Harry Truman.
Henry Kissinger never wanted the 20,000 pages of his telephone transcripts made public - not while he was alive, at any rate.
I see a direct line between Kennedy and Richard Nixon and the opening to China and the detente with the Soviet Union.
The greatest presidents have been those who demonstrated astute judgment in times of crisis - often despite the advice they were getting.
Historians partial to Kennedy see matters differently from those partial to L.B.J. Vietnam has become a point of contention in defending and criticizing J.F.K.
In the late 19th century, the Populists - a protest movement of mainly disaffected farmers and workers - threatened to overturn established authority.
As a little boy, I apparently had a predilection for undoing latch gates, running up pathways and ringing doorbells - and then running off again and away before the door was opened behind me.
Larry Hart and Dick Rodgers were both bright Jewish boys from Manhattan who at one point or another went to Columbia, but there the similarity in their backgrounds ends.
It makes me proud, and it makes me scared. More than anything, I want to be an actor and I want to keep working, and I think there's a danger in being perceived as a poster boy for something.
If you can't ignore an insult, top it; if you can't top it, laugh it off; and if you can't laugh it off, it's probably deserved.
