I really feel that my life story is a continuation of the Great American Dream - the immigrant who comes to this country and is allowed to excel. How many other countries would let me do that?
I just feel like I'm the luckiest person in the world being able to do what I love and be able to do it all day every day if I like, you know, I mean it's great, I love it.
One thing all the way through the show to me is boring. I don't care how great the artist is. I find that if my audience is very young, and they want to hear very young songs, my show will be dominated by that. But there'll be some ballads here and t...
I relax by looking at things and reading about things. Even the simplest thing can reveal a great deal about the world around us. It relaxes me greatly to sit back with my feet up and look around my study at the everyday things that surround me.
The varying modes of flight exhibited by our diurnal birds of prey have always been to me a subject of great interest, especially as by means of them I have found myself enabled to distinguish one species from another, to the farthest extent of my po...
I have a piano in my kitchen. I read a great biography about Tom Waits that said that he had a piano in his kitchen; he had a grand piano in his kitchen. And I thought, 'Well, if Tom Waits has one, then I must.'
I believe, from reading biographies, that the great musicians have also been great cooks: Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Max Roach. I think I've worked out why this is - unsociable hours, plus general creativity.
Lauryn Hill, P-Funk, Marvin Gaye, Public Enemy - I have a very diverse palate for music. I can go from Judy Garland to Jimi Hendrix to Stevie Wonder to Rachmaninoff. I just love great music.
I've followed the lives of great musicians and have learned that you don't have to always write in pain. You have all of your past experiences, feelings, and thoughts that you can turn on when you need them and turn off when you don't.
When we finally got to play that and we had a great show there, well I can tell it was pretty awesome. Y'know, we probably did bigger festivals since then; we probably headlined bigger festivals since then, but I will always remember that.
Just the other day I pulled out this old cassette of Ragged Glory and I popped it into my cassette player and I was digging it. They were just a great rock and roll band, one that presents the song ahead of everything else - there's no grand idea or ...
There's Hezbollah, there's Hamas, there is a whole range of terrorist targets out there related to Palestine and to Israel that we ought to be trying to deal with. And there's a great deal of targets in the Philippines, Indonesia. You name it, there ...
Haiti is 10.4-million people, of whom 35 per cent are children under 15. The country has always had great potential - and this is still the case. Our ill fortune has long been a matter of bad governance. And now things have changed.
I remember watching Barbra Streisand and seeing Jennifer Grey in 'Dirty Dancing' - these were people who acted like me and looked like me. Now it's great that everyone on 'Glee' is so unique and people can relate to us and look up to us.
I've met and sketched most of the great athletes from the past five decades and their movement, grace and energy have kept me captivated over the years. That's what the ancient Greeks first saw and that's what caught my interest.
There's something always instinctively visually right about nature. There's no difference, to my eye, between looking at a great painting and looking at nature. Because painting, when it's great, has the same immutable rightness, unquestioned rightne...
Although, I am proud of all my Symphonies as they all have something special to say, my particular favourite is the Fifth. As the great Mahler expert Donald Mitchell said that if Mahler had written another Symphony, it would have been my Fifth!
I don't want to be the flavor, the passing thing that the girls scream at. I think that it's more important for me, honestly, that the guy who gets dragged to the show, you know, looks at his wife and says, thank you, that was great and tells his bud...
The name 'The Beach Boys' is controlled by Brother Records Inc., which was founded by the original members of the Beach Boys and whose sole shareholders voted over a decade ago to grant me an exclusive license to tour as 'The Beach Boys.' With it, I'...
I've never really spent too much or put too much gravity or placed too much importance on being a pop star. It's like, OK, great, does that mean I don't have to do anything anymore except walk around and be a pop star?
The '20s ended in an era of extravagance, sort of like the one we're in now. There was a big crash, but then the country picked itself up again, and we had some great years. Those were the days when American believed in itself. I was happy and proud ...
