You can imagine me as a kid growing up in redneck Texas with ballet shoes, tucking the violin under my arm. I had to fight my way up.

If you live through the initial stage of fame and get past it, and remember thats not who you are. If you live past that, then you have a hope of maybe learning how to spell the word artist.

What winning is to me is not giving up, is no matter what's thrown at me, I can take it. And I can keep going.

If I leave this Earth, I want to leave this Earth just knowing I've tried to give something back and tried to do something worthwhile with myself.

It seems everybody has been somehow affected by cancer, either through a relative or a close friend or somewhere, and they know how devastating cancer can be. And they see me, and I refuse to let it affect how I live and what I do.

I would have never wanted to write another management book. There are so many of them, and everybody says the same thing about them, and they are all the same - they give the exact same advice. It's like a diet book; they all say eat less calories, exercise more, and every single book has the same conclusion.

Science fiction isn't just thinking about the world out there. It's also thinking about how that world might be - a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they're going to change the world we live in, they - and all of us - have to be able to think about a world that works differently.

There are many domestic issues that give us a lot of common ground to work on. Health, education and immigration are among the areas where we share mutual goals and aspirations. There are also many values that we share as a communities.