We didn't get to see a lot of movies in my house growing up, so the first time I got to go to the movies - I think it was 'E.T.' - I was like, 'Oh my God, somebody else gets my imagination!'

I can safely say that I had an incredibly difficult and trying past growing up and trying to be an artist and standing up as who I am in this world.

It's a struggle for anybody to take their paradigms and set of beliefs and understandings and completely flip the script.

My favorite thing about working with Lady Gaga is really just the sheer level of creativity she brings to the table. And she's really one of the most intelligent people I've ever known. Her intelligence is equaled by her heart.

It's just too late to ban all guns. There are 300 million. We should've done that after the Civil War - that's when we should've taken away guns and defined what militias were. But we didn't do it then, and we can't now.

The Franco-German tandem at the core of post-war European integration has become lopsided. Relations between Berlin and Paris are unusually poor, with some French politicians decrying the 'selfish intransigence' in the euro crisis of Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel.

Abraham Lincoln went through 12 generals before he got Ulysses S. Grant. He had never done a Civil War before.

You can watch a little bit of war from your nice living room - 30 seconds of what's going on in Syria - and when you've had enough, switch over to some celebrity programme. We live our life through screens and images in this way, and we don't know what is real or fake anymore. It doesn't matter.