Jack Palance was my distant uncle - that's the family gossip. Growing up, my family knew everything about his face getting burned and scarred in the military and how that mutilation led him to become such a famous 'heavy' in films. I prayed for good scars of my own. Not just acne scars.

I don't do much more than organise other people's ideas and insights and thoughts, and sort of harvest them, and inventory them and present them.

I was born in 1962, and it seems that throughout my entire life the world has demanded peace but maintained conflict.

If you flee from the things you fear, there's no resolution.

A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.

I'm always swimming forward like a shark. You just keep going and you don't rest. I love waking up knowing that I have a problem to solve.

It's a dream to be its conductor. Sometimes I think, 'My God, I can't believe it.' It's a dream which came true.

So when folks talk about the deficit and leaving the deficit for our children, we will never get out of debt had this country until people get back to work, until they have good-paying jobs, and in between times, we will not move this economy forward until we are helping people be able to keep going in this recession.