The cartoon is a metaphor really for the fact that it's almost impossible in our celebrity obsessed culture to move around genres and sort of change your ideas, change your face, you know?

Americans have been tremendously fortunate in poetry, regarding both the quantity and quality of poetry produced. Unfortunately, it remains in schools and universities; it is not widely distributed.

If I were to make an uneducated guess about L.A.'s relationship with folk and psychedelia, I would say it must be the weather.

Spiritually, we have marginalized the Bible. We've trivialized marriage, and we've neutralized the church. America today is in great turmoil. It feels like the soul of our nation has been taken from...

Positive culture comes from being mindful, and respecting your coworkers, and being empathetic.

I don't think any other holiday embraces the food of the Midwest quite like Thanksgiving. There's roasted meat and mashed potatoes. But being here is also about heritage. Cleveland is really a giant...

If I had the choice to travel to two places in Europe, it would be Paris and London.

Miami is one of these great places that is a really sensual, physically beautiful place.

I hope America can also be the cultural leader of the world, and use this frontier spirit to lead and show others that we need courage to go places where we have not gone before.

In this media - drenched, multitasking, always - on age, many of us have forgotten how to unplug and immerse ourselves completely in the moment. We have forgotten how to slow down. Not surprisingly,...

I love the ubiquitous idly - dosa combination. In fact, that was my pet name as a kid! In school, I would bug the canteen boys to get me my daily quota of idly!

I always knew that food and wine were vital, with my mother being Italian and a good cook.

Italy has great food and Barcelona has great energy.

For me, art is about learning and about living with people. It's alive.

I always point out to my Passover guests that the Hebrews were not living in isolation. They were at the crossroads of several great, elaborate cultures with their own mythology and religion and art...

I think people should know more of Africa in terms of its joie de vivre, its feeling for life. In spite of the images that one knows about Africa - the economic poverty, the corruption - there's a joy...

There's so much beautiful music in the world, and the kids are getting robbed.

Stockholm is unique in that it's built on islands and surrounded by water, so you get this enormous sense of freedom. It's got everything you could possibly need - everything New York or London has...

In Seattle, I soon found that my radical ideas and aesthetic explorations - ideas and explorations that in Richmond, Virginia, might have gotten me stoned to death with hush puppies - were not only...

We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like.

Japan, not only a mega - busy city that thrives on electronics and efficiency, actually has an almost sacred appreciation of nature. One must travel outside of Tokyo to truly experience the 'old...

Public scandals are America's favorite parlor sport. Learning about the flaws and misdeeds of the rich and famous seems to satisfy our egalitarian yearnings.

The Olympics are never just about sports.

The late 20th century had just enough communication abilities to allow superstar-ness and communality to happen. It was a musical renaissance that rivals the visual one that happened in the 1400s.

Reggae, oh man. It's the ultimate music. The positivity. The musicality. The whole cultural expressionism of it. The danceability. Just the cool factor. The melody factor. Some of it comes from a...

Talking about food is like talking about your dreams. Everyone has something to say. We all have to eat, it's just what we eat which differs. Some people eat for fuel and I feel bad for them.

I've always had great respect for Paddington because he is amusingly English and eccentric. He is a great British institution and my generation grew up with the books and then Michael Horden's...

Americans are the most generous country on the planet. I've worked in Europe, I've worked in Australia. There is no where else where you get absolutely no attitude for being a foreigner. If you do...

Contrary to popular opinion, the hustle is not a new dance step - it is an old business procedure.

For a country to have a great writer is to have another government.