I've sort of made up my mind that I have to do my career and I have to be a mother. These are my two responsibilities; of course the baby comes first.

All of my life, when things got too difficult, I folded up the tent and went to bed. I couldn't stand a challenge... I was terrified of confrontation. I was very laid-back, and just wouldn't get involved or fight back.

Back then, I was an acoustically-oriented artist. Honestly, 'Poetry Man' wouldn't have been my first choice.

Give me a strapless gown and a rhinestone-studded guitar and some 55-year-olds in my audience, along with their kids and grandkids. Don't give me 'boogie'!

I still remember, at the age of 12, learning that segregation had been permitted only a couple of decades before I was born and that a woman's right to vote was not even a century old. But it was great Americans who stood up, some dying for the cause, to make our country better.

The leading cause of death among fashion models is falling through street grates.

My politics of optimism and hope still casts its lot with the Democrats - in the optimistic hope that the dying embers of its status as the party of our better angels, one that took risks for social justice, can still be fanned into a flame. But I'm an old man, born in 1969.

I do not care so much for the death of my gunner, as for other passages of my voyage, for I have good friends in England that will bring me off for that.