I was fine being in the closet at the beginning of my career because that's what you were supposed to be - until I realized that it didn't serve anybody, and I was left feeling utterly empty. This is who I am, so I've gotta be me.

For years I tried to put myself in a box, and it frustrated me, so I had to let go and let the universe take its course.

When I had a record deal in the '90s, that was my dream - to make an album like Barbra Streisand's Broadway album - and they laughed me out of the room. Broadway wasn't cool. But artists like Michael Buble and Josh Groban have brought the classic genre back to the forefront, so I'm trying to find my way inside that market.

You can't ever put yourself in a position where someone is requiring you to inhabit somebody else's energy. You have to own your thing, or own it with very fiber of your being.

People are very much worried that our kids are not going to inherit the same opportunities that we inherited from our parents.

To maintain a joyful family requires much from both the parents and the children. Each member of the family has to become, in a special way, the servant of the others.

In 'Hardflip,' you have a relationship where the father and son haven't seen each other in 18 years, but they find they're very alike: pigheaded, stubborn, passionate. It's a wonderful story of how you can't get away from how similar you and your children are.

If you happen to live close to the desert border, you can pretty much calculate how long it will be before you have to carry your kids away and abandon your home and your life as you know it.