I'd gone from being this art student messing about with music to this girl with a record deal magazine front covers and all this hype. In many ways it was everything I ever wanted but when it happened all I felt was total paralysing fear.

Do the thing you fear to do and keep on doing it... that is the quickest and surest way ever yet discovered to conquer fear.

It's funny to be discovered by a lot of people who didn't know you before. People always used to say 'Do you shop at Home Depot?' or 'Does your kid go to such and such school?' They want to know why they know me even if they don't know my name. I don't think that's a bad thing by the way I think it's nice to be kind of anonymously famous.

My office walls are covered with autographs of famous writers - it's what my children call my 'dead author wall.' I have signatures from Mark Twain Earnest Hemingway Jack London Harriett Beecher Stowe Pearl Buck Charles Dickens Rudyard Kipling Alfred Lord Tennyson to name a few.

The excitement for me lies not so much in interviewing the hard-to-get famous person but the person whom you are about to discover. You know like maybe the character actors who are just coming into their own and you're realizing how great they are.

I worked on scores. I went to the musical library in Berlin which is very famous. I discovered that we had scores of Beethoven printed scores of Beethoven that are full of mistakes. Not the wrong or false notes but the wrong dynamic understandable things.

Berry Gordy turned his house into a studio and discovered over 30 acts in the city. And we're famous all over the world.

It's very difficult today for girls to become supermodels. There is a lot more competition a lot of countries in the East have opened up so there are many more models than there were in the Nineties. Now they have to compete with famous actresses but also with say reality stars to be on the magazine covers.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: 'try being rich first'. See if that doesn't cover most of it. There's not much downside to being rich other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous you end up with a 24-hour job.

I just want to make music I don't want people to talk about me. All I've ever wanted to do was sing. I don't want to be a celebrity. I don't want to be in people's faces you know constantly on covers of magazine that I haven't even known I'm on.

A retired teacher paid $62 000 towards her pension and nothing yes nothing for full family medical dental and vision coverage over her entire career. What will we pay her? $1.4 million in pension benefits and another $215 000 in health care benefit premiums over her lifetime.

I get 0.5 seconds to react to a ball sometimes even less than that. I can't be thinking of what XYZ has said about me. I need to surrender myself to my natural instincts. My subconscious mind knows exactly what to do. It is trained to react. At home my family doesn't discuss media coverage.

For more than 200 years materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs.

The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms and in forty years of searching none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief.

I have this embedded faith in the process through which films of a certain type get discovered on longer timelines.

The origin of the absurd idea of immortal life is easy to discover it is kept alive by hope and fear by childish faith and by cowardice.