The human race has had long experience and a fine tradition in surviving adversity. But we now face a task for which we have little experience, the task of surviving prosperity.
If someone is making a judgment when they don't have firsthand experience, it's intolerant. How can you make a judgment on something you don't know about?
I'm healthy, have a loving and adorable family, great hunting dogs, a gravity defying musical career and most importantly, fuzzy-headed idiots hate me.
If the seams are showing, there is something wrong with the performance or the construction of the piece. This idea is completely at odds with our modern visual experience, because everything today is based on montage.
I have a lot of experience in the studio, performing onstage, talking to an audience. I learned most of that stuff when I was performing with my mom.
It's weird to try to write lyrics for somebody else. They can't really get behind what you're saying or what you want them to say because they didn't experience it.
I don't enjoy traveling in America. I don't like the food, the cars. It is not exotic enough. It all tastes a bit like airline food.
There's not much cooking in our household. We do a lot of raw food, so it's more about putting the right ingredients together to create something scrumptious.
I don't do yoga. I bite the hella outta my nails. I smoke, I eat all the wrong food, I don't exercise.
For the first 50 years of your life the food industry is trying to make you fat. Then, the second 50 years, the pharmaceutical industry is treating you for everything.
Food can become such a point of anxiety - not because it's food, but just because you have anxiety. That's how eating disorders develop.
I'm such a fitness freak that I eat so plain, it's gross. I have oatmeal in the morning and then I have chicken breasts and vegetables and spinach shakes.
Everyone should be commended for allowing people to make disasters, to make failures - you've just got to be sure that it's a magnificent failure and that, by creating a magnificent failure, you plant the seed.
Talking with my friends and family every day helps keep me grounded and connected to home. They are the most important things to me.
My mum's family would all get together, with guitars, harmonica, mandolins and upright bass and play old blues and folk songs. That was normal to me.
I write a lot about other people, like family and friends. I look at their lives and relationships and think, 'Well, if I was in your position, this is how I would see it.'
My mother was a public school teacher in Virginia, and we didn't have any money, we just survived on happiness, on being a happy family.
I'm from a very politically and socially conscious family. My mother always made a point of making us look at what was going on around us and take stock of our part in it.
I was always able to get money, but now it's a little bit more money, and I manage the same way. I just want to see my family do better.
I guess I'm happy that I'm getting the attention. Otherwise, I'd just be playing in a local bar in front of my family members, and I'm sure they'd get sick of that in no time.
For me, Venezuela is very important, not just because it's a place I go to conduct, but because my family is there - my wife, my parents and my musical family.
