I was growing up at a time when music was growing and changing so fast. I had learned all the big band sounds of the 1940s, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey. But then along came Chuck Berry, Les Paul, Fats Domino and I figured out how to make their music as well.

When I did the anthem, I did it with the understanding in my heart and mind that I did it because I'm a patriot. I was trying to be a grateful patriot. I was expressing my feelings for America when I did the anthem my way instead of just singing it with an orchestra.

The day I stop learning and I don't try to make myself better on the guitar, that's the day I hang it up and say, 'Goodbye.'

My first memory of playing music was when I was 3 years old in Puerto Rico. I played percussion on a tin can behind my uncle, who played the cuatro.

No two composers were more totally at home in front of the piano than Debussy and Chopin, hands to keys to strings to sound waves to pen and paper in one perfect gesture of inspiration.

My motivation was an idea of being able to improve the conditions of life, to try to find a remedy to many of the problems facing the world. That's what led me into economics. I saw it as a way of helping people.

Whatever I might have imagined a terminal diagnosis would do to my spirit, it summoned quite the opposite - the greatest appreciation for life itself. So I will never give up, and I will never give in.

I envy people with dreams and passions, but I don't think that way. I still don't have a 'bliss' to follow. For people like me - I suspect that's most people - holding out for a 'dream' or a 'passion' is paralyzing. I just like having work I enjoy that feels meaningful. That's hard enough... but it's enough.