People have become less discriminating listeners, which is tragic, really. There's a lot of emperor's new clothes out there, whether they're female or male solo acts. That bothers me. It's hard to break through, and it's like climbing Mount Everest if you actually do.

At the age of 15 months my daughter was diagnosed with very bad asthma, and essentially I put my career on hold for a good eight years.

But looking back, the fact was that I had a couple of big hits too quickly and it was simply too much for an introvert like me to handle.

For me music is a vehicle to bring our pain to the surface, getting it back to that humble and tender spot where, with luck, it can lose its anger and become compassion again.

There's a misconception that survival of the fittest means survival of the most aggressive. The adjective 'Darwinian' used to refer to ruthless competition; you used to read that in business journals. But that's not what Darwinian means to a biologist; it's whatever leads to reproductive success.

Since Star Wars, that film's success led to bigger budgets, more hardware, that the great movies like the ones I did, which were studio movies, are now independent movies. They range from half a million to several million, and a lot of those have very interesting roles.

My purpose is to have American Jews look away from the success story with which they've cheered themselves up, and to have them remember the classical tradition, whatever it is.

When you delegate work to the member of the team, your job is to clearly frame success and describe the objectives.