My dad, in particular, was adamant that I should finish my education. He encouraged me to go to Oxford, for instance, and I rather doubt I'd have gone if he hadn't. I would have gone straight back to L.A. and tried to start my career.

American culture is very good at interpersonal relationships and people skills, whereas we're incredibly adept at academics and straightforward 19th-century Victorian education.

I support equal rights and equal dignity for all.

Everyone's parents were famous actors at my school, pretty much! I think I went to school with Paris Hilton when I was three. That's what L.A. is, though - it's an industry town. You go to school with kids and you think, 'Well that's normal, they make movies.'

It must be something extraordinary to be able to say to yourself that the happiness of every French person is in your hands.

No matter what anybody thinks about any of them, every record I've done has been done with the same amount of care, anguish, pain, suffering, and joy.

People create from different places. Some love to create from a tortured place, some from a joyful place. And when I feel like I'm a 5-year-old kid in my backyard playing pretend, that's when I'm happiest.

The imagination is the spur of delights... all depends upon it, it is the mainspring of everything; now, is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?