I've always loved music but I never really played anything. After 'Walk the Line' and learning to play guitar and having that sense of performing I think that certainly opened the door for me for music.

True leadership lies in guiding others to success. In ensuring that everyone is performing at their best doing the work they are pledged to do and doing it well.

I've been acting my whole life. I have this huge imagination! I'm a dancer and my mom's a dance teacher and I was always performing and entertaining people. I'd go to see live theatre or a movie and I'd become the main character for a few days afterwards. I loved being somebody new for a temporary amount of time.

I learn something not because I have to but because I really want to. That's the same view I have for performing. I'm performing because I really want to not because I have to bring bread back home.

As long as I am given the opportunity to keep performing and keep exploring in whatever medium I'll be happy. As long as I get to spend time with my family I'll be happy. As long as I can write in some form I'll be happy. It is the essential things like that I equate with happiness.

I tell my students it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see who's very far away who's a different color who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.

In opera as with any performing art to be in great demand and to command high fees you must be good of course but you must also be famous. The two are different things.

Touring is tough. You're almost in a haze because you don't really know where you are half the time: You're in a hotel room one moment and the next thing you know you're onstage performing for 60 000 people then you're back on an airplane. It's very hectic and I couldn't do it without my family.

Performing is a profound experience at least for me.

Performing is a profound experience at least for me. It's not as if I sit down and play 'Fire and Rain' by myself just to hear it again. But to offer it up... the energy that it somehow summons live takes me right back and I do get a reconnection to the emotions.