My family didn't like me going on the stage, and they didn't much like my being a writer, either.

I was brought up Irish, where there was room for my own private world.

A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.

I think the idea of 'Mary Poppins' has been blowing in and out of me, like a curtain at a window, all my life.

Unprecedented technological capabilities combined with unlimited human creativity have given us tremendous power to take on intractable problems like poverty, unemployment, disease, and environmental degradation. Our challenge is to translate this extraordinary potential into meaningful change.

I'm a songwriter; that's where it starts. I love writing with someone that shares that same feeling of accomplishment. I'll play music for my fans as long as they'll listen, but I fancy myself as a writer first.

I'm not a propaganda machine. I tell things how I see them. When I say, for example, that corruption is not the only thing the West should think about when they think about Nigeria, I'm not saying it doesn't exist but that people have the complete wrong focus. There's music, there's art, there's culture.

Imagination rules the world.