I'm an obsessive hiker and I do it every day for two hours and it really helps me when it comes to learning songs or scripts.

People on both sides of any conflict believe they are right, whether it's on a TV show or in the real world.

My wife will tell you that if you feel my hands before I walk on for a performance, you could chill a bottle of wine.

We need to learn to accept and certainly mourn any harm that comes to any human being on this earth. But we also need to not be vengeful.

There was a bidding war between Epic Records and Jive - now RCA - which was bittersweet. Just having labels bid over me was really cool, but I ended up going with Jive because it felt better over there, and they have my favorite artists like Usher, Chris Brown, and Justin Timberlake.

The American War of Independence is the expulsion of the intrusive elements, alien to the American essence. If American reality is the reinvention of itself, whatever is found in any way irreducible or unassimilable is not American.

What bin Laden had hoped to achieve in Afghanistan in the post-9/11 period, which was to drag the United States into a protracted guerrilla war like the one he had fought against the Soviets, never happened. Instead, that protracted guerrilla war is now playing out in Iraq, in the heart of the Middle East.

There was no way I was going to write about Africa and not include the triumphant continuity of life that had also been part of my experience there. It's not just war and famine all the time.