Anyone that has a job that takes them away from home I think can understand the difficulties in maintaining consistency not only with your family and those you love but with your friends.

Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family society and state in which we live.

Given my last position that I was the first U.S attorney post 9/11 in New Jersey I understand acutely the pain and sorrow and upset of the family members who lost loved ones that day at the hands of radical Muslim extremists. And their sensitivities and concerns have to be taken into account.

My encounters with racism are sort of second-hand situations where I might be standing around with a group of white friends and someone makes a comment that they wouldn't make at my family reunion.

I eat a little bit of everything and not a lot of anything. Everything in moderation. I know that's really hard for people to understand but I grew up in an Italian family where we didn't overdo anything. We ate pasta yes but not a lot of it.

I'm still very connected to my family to the world I grew up in. I understand what it means to be afraid that you can't pay a doctor's bill. Or to have to make the choice between buying a band uniform for a seventh-grader and making the insurance payment on time. That will never leave me. It was how I lived until I was well into my adult years.

I grew up in a family of strong women and I owe any capacity I have to understand women to my mother and big sister. They taught me to respect women in a way where I've always felt a strong emotional connection to women which has also helped me in the way I approach my work as an actor.

I've never had a very closely connected family. My parents split up when I was young and I was living with my mom for a little while then I was kind of just on my own really young. It wasn't some kind of global tragedy it was just never really a very close-knit family. So there was support in the sense that they didn't stand in my way.

People had this image of the Jacksons as the perfect American family and I destroyed that image. But what people have to understand is writing that book was very healing for me.

Growing up I was taught that a man has to defend his family. When the wolf is trying to get in you gotta stand in the doorway.