I'm so lucky, I'm just really grateful for what I've got around me - children and my wife and everything else.
I am aware of the words 'national treasure' being attached to me occasionally. It just makes me feel old.
Then again, I think about high school every day and I think about being a little kid every day too.
Normally as a director, you do look at other films and things that are relevant. But with this film, it became impossible because I became so aware of the camera placement.
Reality TV is here, it's been here really since the Carol Levis Discovery Show in 1957. It's never changed. It just looks a bit different.
Hip-hop is so much about character and caricature that people just see you as a character. Very rarely are you flesh and bone to people.
Hip-hop is an instant gratification, winners and losers circle, and often those who are losing give up after three or four, five years.
I do secret stand-up shows around New York. I announce and tweet this to nobody - I get onstage and I do a quick five minutes.
I want the 'Roots' biopic to be animated - I see Charles Schulz drawing us. I think it would be more hilarious with the voices of children.
I think my songs are singing to the rural heart. It's not whether you're from a big city or the middle of nowhere in a small town.
Generally, you are held to a sound and that becomes your sound. That gets branded as your sound, and all the copycats start with it because the labels are looking for that sound.
Radio was my lifeline as a kid growing up in Winnipeg in the 1950s. It connected me with the wider world outside our little prairie city.
It's nice to get any awards, whether it's lifetime achievement or the Keith Richards award for being alive one more year.
Then, there was Greenpeace, I remember that when they first started out with the boats in the waters, and the guys in the boats between the whales and the boats that will hunting the whales with spear guns.
When I used to play nightclubs, you had to play Top 40 or favorite oldies that maybe people could relate to.
You have to remember the band played from 1960 to 1965, every night. You get into a rut playing nightclubs every night, and you didn't want to run it into the ground.
All my films are shot on hand-held cameras. These cameras took five years to build and had to be light enough to be carried.
I am so envious of my colleagues from 100 years ago who only sang new works, they hardly ever sang revivals.
I was constantly being pushed toward a European ideal of what it means to be a classical or opera singer, let's say in the Renata Tebaldi mode. I reject that.
I'm American. I'm eclectic. I'm going to follow my musical passions. And if people don't like it, and it hurts my legacy, I'm not going to worry about that.
When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.
