What stars do in their off-hours is a never-ending source of diddling curiosity to the tabloid sensibility.

If Broadway no longer seems behind the times or ahead of the times, it may be because there are no 'times' anymore, no prevailing Zeitgeist that sets the fashion, pace, and prevailing look.

High expectations weren't nurtured in my neck of nowhere back then - children weren't fawned over from an early age as 'gifted' and groomed for a prizewinning future; self-esteem was considered something you had to pick from the garden yourself.

People want to be special. I think ambition can take in a whole package of things, power or sexual excitement.

The world, post-Katrina, was a hard time for my city. The hardest time. For people who didn't live through it, no words can fully express the pain, the rage, the grief, and the futility we New Orleanians felt. For the people who did, words seemed like a feeble protest against a relentless night without end.

Beloved Renegade' is a meditation on Walt Whitman, on tenderness, on dying.

It is death that goes down to the center of the earth, the great burial church the earth is, and then to the curved ends of the universe, as light is said to do.

Usually, people in the Islamic world set aside one-third or one-fourth of their wealth for endowment, and that will be effective only after their death. But in my case, I decided to implement this decision in my lifetime itself.