When my mother was born on 14 April, he named her after a Latin American holiday, the Day of Americas, that nobody knew about. My due date also happened to be 14 April.
Today, 65 percent of America's population live in metropolitan areas - and 95 percent of all the transit miles traveled are traveled there. Metropolitan regions are the engines of our economy.
Historically, maritime travelers had to pass around the entire mass of North and South America, including the bottom tip, the tempestuous Cape Horn, which was littered with shipwrecks.
Children born of married parents in America face a higher risk of seeing them break up than children born of unmarried parents in Sweden.
America is a place where you can be born into a low-income household but still lift yourself up, and it doesn't matter what color you are.
I examined a lot of CIA declassified UFO files, which are fascinating, because there was a huge UFO craze going on in America. There still is today, but it certainly started in '47. And by the '50s, it was in full force.
Children's programming in America, I think it's pretty shoddy in terms of lack of diversity. It's pretty much cartoons and Disney sort of shows. I don't find any of that stimulating for children.
Indian films have this obsession with hygienic clean spaces, even though the country's not so clean. They're either shot in the studios or shot in London, in America, in Switzerland - clean places. Everywhere except India.
I have two sons in America, and all they care about in Chinese culture is Jackie Chan and Jet Li.
Firstly, economic globalisation has brought prosperity and development to many countries, but also financial crises to Asia, Latin America and Russia, and increasing poverty and marginalisation.
No one is more sentimentalized in America than mothers on Mother's Day, but no one is more often blamed for the culture's bad people and behavior.
In America most everybody who's Italian is half Italian. Except me. I'm all Italian. I'm mostly Sicilian, and I have a little bit of Neapolitan in me. You get your full dose with me.
America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by conflict between autonomy and security.
And in this community, as in all others, the Golden Rule still applies - we must be act toward other nations as we would have them act towards America.
I think immigrants, when they're stressed, think that there's something wrong with America, when it's really just difficult to leave a country and all that you know.
Recently, my personal advisors have been telling me to go to America. Actually, people have been walking up to me in the street and telling me to sod off, but that's the same thing, isn't it?
You know if we were to look back and how we were in 1955 living in Jim Crow, living in segregation, living in segregated schools, it's hard to believe that it was America, but it really was.
In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.
This is what America is about when it comes to understanding that it is equal opportunity versus equal achievement. Each and every one of us has the opportunity for greatness in this country.
Once you 'got' Pop, you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.
It's also very important in Latin America. If we can deal with the drug problem there, some of their strife there, it's less likely we have immigration problems here.
