I'm kind of a good girl - and I'm not. I'm a good girl because I really believe in love integrity and respect. I'm a bad girl because I like to tease. I know that I have sex appeal in my deck of cards. But I like to get people thinking. That's what the stories in my music do.

I've come to recognize what I call my 'inside interests.' Telling stories. And helping people tell their stories is a sort of interpersonal gardening. My work at NBC News was to report the news but in hindsight I often tried to look for some insight to share that might spark a moment of recognition in a viewer.

Hollywood has its own way of telling stories. I was just telling stories that I was familiar with. And it's what I want to do in the future: I want to take my audio cinema and put it on the screen.

So what I do now is to pre-empt that by making the up into a virtue and telling funny stories about how crap I am before people have a chance to notice it for themselves and think maybe I haven't realised.

Sometimes people get mad at The Simpsons' subversive story telling but there's another message in there which is a celebration of making wild funny stories.

For years I used to bore my wife over lunch with stories about funny incidents.

Ray Bradbury is for many reasons the most influential writer in my life. Throughout our long friendship Ray supplied not only his terrific stories but a grand model of what a writer could be should be and yet rarely is: brilliant and charming and accessible willing to tolerate and to teach happy to inspire but also to be inspired.

Government has the role of suiting people for freedom. People aren't made for freedom spontaneously. There's sort of a 19-year race between when people are born and when they become adults. And government has a role in making them at the end of 19 years suited to be upright trustworthy repositories of popular sovereignty.

Real freedom is creative proactive and will take me into new territories. I am not free if my freedom is predicated on reacting to my past.

There's a glorious sense of freedom in comedy just allowing myself to tell jokes allowing myself to interrupt myself and tell old African folk stories that I made up - or didn't - and Jamaican stories.