In our culture, I feel like everyone just wants the good life, the dream life, but I'm learning to embrace suffering because with suffering there's so much good that comes out of it.

I really believed music was going to be a big part of my future, and that's why I took a truck driving job, so I could maintain my singing job at night. I put about 30 hours a week just for singing, going between two churches. And in order to afford that, I had to take a full time job so I could do my passion.

Your future is only big enough for you to walk through, not for you and your past to walk through.

I needed to walk through the 'Idol' door to get to the rest of my career.

My parents were both born in 1930. They grew up during the Depression. They wanted their children to have secure lives, to have a good salary and a pension plan. If I could've guaranteed that I'd be a best-selling writer, that would've been one thing, but nobody could say that. So I knew better than to say that was ambition.

I never wanted to hurt anyone else, most of all my family and my kids.

National interest is above anything else. Just because you sit in an air-conditioned room, you can say you shouldn't relate cricket and movies to politics. Ask anyone who has lost a family member to terror attacks, and you will get your answer.

People think that cartoons are meant to be watched on television and not in cinemas. To get people into cinemas to see animation really boils down to storytelling for the family.