I show rock and rollers how to grow old gracefully.

If you don't have God in your life, you have to fill up on something. And you usually reach for the four great substitutes, the classical addictions: wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. So you try to fill yourself up.

With Del Shannon - and I've got to tell you this - there's nobody probably on the face of the earth that I identified more with musically. We used to sit and sing George Jones and Hank Williams tunes.

If you make excuses, you're going to believe in a lie. And I don't believe in that lie that you can't make it, that somebody is trying to hold you back.

I guess I have a talent for humiliation, a place within me that experience can't reach, which is terrible in real life but something that comes in handy in writing. It seems as though humiliation has become a career for me.

We've invested in Newark's children, the schools and teachers, and these are long-term bets that need a number of years to really pan out. We've seen and learned how important it is to listen to the community and really get a sense of what they need and want. And it's a long journey.

When I was waiting tables, washing dishes, or mowing lawns for money, I never thought of myself as stuck in some station in life. I was on my own path, my own journey, an American journey where I could think for myself, decide for myself, define happiness for myself.

For so long, I just let people surmise what they would about my life and my choices, and other people have written books and told tales.