The heart of Jesus is compassionate and understanding. It has felt the sting of ingratitude, and when my heart suffers from that same offense, I can turn to him, and he understands my feelings.

Each angel that God created was in himself a masterpiece. Each one possessed his own degree of intelligence and his own beauty.

To God, all things are present; there is no past or future - it is all now.

Like Jesus, every human being has enough memories in his past to occupy his time and thoughts continually. It is not the remembrance of these incidents but the reliving of them that creates havoc in our souls.

The family is very important. They make me feel good always because if I won, when I started to be famous, the relationship never changed with my friends and family.

When I lost my first record deal, my wife and kids and I lost - I wouldn't say friends, but - we lost a lot people around us. They just vanished! They were nowhere to be found. I couldn't get a break, and I couldn't get people to even respond to my emails about songs, no matter how good something was.

When you get together with childhood friends, for example, there's an intimacy that you instantly have because you share something really profound in your past. There's a shortcut to emotional intimacy if you share your past with somebody. It's really empowering when you're reunited with people who share that.

People often think of America as a classless society, but, of course, that isn't true. Within immigrant communities, there's an enormous distinction of class, depending on who your parents are, and that kind of thing comes out really quick in things like marriage and interpersonal relationships.