My parents were educated in the Turkish system and went straight from high school to medical school; my mom, who had skipped a grade, was dissecting corpses at age seventeen. Growing up in America, I think I envied my parents' education. By comparison, everything I did in school seemed so sort of low-stakes and infantilizing.

When I was growing up, many of my relatives had never seen a black person before. Today, hundreds, maybe thousands of Africans live in Istanbul's old city alone. It's hard to imagine their lives in their human totality.

Most Americans have probably heard the song 'Santa Claus Is Coming to Town' about a billion times in the supermarket alone.

For a Nabokov fan, paging through 'Fine Lines,' which includes a critical introduction and several essayistic evaluations of Nabokov's scientific oeuvre, can feel a bit like reading the second half of 'Pale Fire': one is confronted by a content-rich, almost dementedly tangential commentary on an increasingly inscrutable work.

We have a problem now with parents stealing their kids' CDs, so the roles have been reversed.

Remember that the problem with hyper-parenting isn't that it's bad for children; it's that it's bad for parents.

I love my family very much. I wish I could see them a little more often than I do. But we understand because we're a show business family and we all work.

I want to be on stage and perform and win Grammys and help out my family in Bulgaria, because they are struggling, and my mom and dad, too.