The U.S. tries to provide immigrants who grow up here with a world-class education and imbue them with the can-do attitude that has long defined American innovation.

The phenomenon of home schooling is a wonderful example of the American can-do attitude. Growing numbers of parents have become disenchanted with government-run public schools. Many parents have simply taken matters into their own hands literally.

What I wish I had is that I wish I was a little more Greek in that I wish I could lose my North American driven attitude and that I could be a little bit more poetic and laissez faire.

I fell in love with Erica Kane the summer before my freshman year of high school. Like all red-blooded teen American boys I'd come home from water polo practice and eat a box of Entenmann's Pop'Ems donut holes in front of the TV while obsessively fawning over 'All My Children' and Erica her clothes and her narcissistic attitude.

The attitude of insolent haughtiness is characteristic of the relationships Americans form with what is alien to them with others.

We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community.

I think people feel threatened by homosexuality. The problem isn't about gay people the problem is about the attitude towards gay people. People think that all gays are Hannibal Lecters. But gay people are sons and daughters politicians and doctors American heroes and daughters of American heroes.

The compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that they always should may and actually can choose somebody with whom to share their blessings. Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of gifts.

Americans are the most generous country on the planet. I've worked in Europe I've worked in Australia. There is no where else where you get absolutely no attitude for being a foreigner. If you do your job well they embrace you.

It's important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived. In fact Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years before. These were very intelligent subtle and sophisticated people with organized societies and great art.

I've got tonnes of aboriginal and Native American art but I'd like even more.

Film in the 20th century it's the American art form like jazz.

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that's it. No America no jazz. I've seen people try to connect it to other countries for instance to Africa but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with Africa.

Abstract Expressionism - the first American movement to have a worldwide influence - was remarkably short-lived: It heated up after World War II and was all but done for by 1960 (although visit any art school today and you'll find a would-be Willem de Kooning).

Robert Rauschenberg was not a giant of American art he was the giant. No American created so many aesthetic openings for so many artists.

I like it when somebody tells me a story and I actually really feel that that's becoming like a lost art in American cinema.

You look at the steamboat the railroad the car the airplane - not all of these were invented in the Anglo-American world but they were popularized and extended by it. They were made possible by the financial architecture the capital intensive operations invented and developed by the Anglo-Americans.