You don't know what you need when you're a young writer. You can get small slivers of critical input, advice, comments, but if you're deep in the perplexity of your own process, as you should be, sorting it out in your own way, nothing is going to guide you more than small gestures of encouragement.

I think that those moments before a performer plays are the moments when the potential for something to be created may - or may not - arrive.

A few days after 9/11, I put the old cassette of 'Born in the U.S.A.,' twisted and worn, on the car deck as I drove past West Point, across the Bear Mountain Bridge, along the Hudson River. It was the perfect moment to hear it.

A kiss is often about the future and the past. A lost dream, about the discretion of the idealism.

My family made big sacrifices but little gestures mean a lot. My sister took me to training when she was pregnant.

My parents didn't want me to go into show business. They were afraid of what would happen if I didn't succeed. They wanted me to get married and have babies. I never saw marriage and family in my life.

My family is big, complicated, and beautiful - and keeps me smiling and whole. It's so important to have family, whether it's biological family, good friends, foster families, or a group of aunties who are raising you. The idea of feeling isolated is scary to me - to walk through the world alone would be heartbreaking.

My family, the support of my friends, the amount of people that have written and come up to me on the street and said, 'Thank you for representing us,' and Adam Lambert, and Lady Gaga, that's been amazing.