If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.

In one sense, Obama's point couldn't be clearer: race is a distraction from class-based inequities. And if we dismiss working-class resentment as camouflaged racism, we will continue to be distracted by the spectre of race.

Music - not just the lyrics, but the music itself - expresses confused or illicit passions: rage, lust, envy, frustration, channeling these energies and creating an outlet for them.

Expression and thought are inextricably linked: crude language permits only crude thinking.

When I used to leave behind my wife and kids and go into training camp for nine weeks at a time, I felt it, especially if you're having young children and leaving them literally within weeks of them being born.

Today's kids have a mind of their own, and they know how to exercise it. Even if I wanted to tell Sara or my son Ibrahim how to lead their lives - which I don't - they would not listen to me. Luckily, Sara chose to complete her studies before pursuing acting. She attended Columbia University and then devoted her attention to Bollywood.

No one can doubt that the sufferings of the sober, virtuous woman, in legal subjection to the mastership of a drunken, immoral husband and father over herself and children, not only from physical abuse, but from spiritual shame and humiliation, must be such as the man himself can not possibly comprehend.

I want to make sure I'm climbing because there's no back-up. No one in my family has a house, and, regardless of your background, if someone has a house, that means you can always come back home. When you don't have that, it's like there isn't anywhere to stand, so you have to keep jumping.