Once in a while, I try to sneak in something less known anyway.

I was very young at the time, and I mainly appreciated their vocal qualities, even though I was already living as they did - as black performers in a white world.

Even in today's opera world, the position of the black tenor is problematic.

If you try to do that in pop music - to play only rare show tunes, for example - people don't come.

But life is tough and if you're creative, it's tougher.

Once in a while, I try to sneak in something less known anyway.

It is people's willingness to take personal risks and confront the powerful by daring to speak the truth, not the truth itself, that ultimately leads to change.

You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.

My best moment of 2011 would definitely be the birth of my daughter six weeks ago, on September 25.

I imagine explaining a work of art to my grandmother in five minutes, and if I can't explain it in five minutes, then it's too obtuse or esoteric.

At the moment I really love listening to the Dave Matthews Band.

Veteran print editors and reporters at places like the 'Times' and 'The New Yorker' manage to feed and clothe their families without costing their companies a million bucks a month, and they produce a great deal more valuable reporting and analysis than the network news stars do.

The German government has taken energetic measures against the propagation of the defective, the mentally diseased, and the criminal.

Since the late 19th century, the median age of first marriage for women had fluctuated between 20 and 22. This had been the shape, pattern and definition of female life.

If you are not leaning, no one will ever let you down.

We want better reasons for having children than not knowing how to prevent them.

To die is one thing. How much worse to know that all the life that ever existed on this planet, and all it ever achieved, was to be obliterated?

My only plan every day is to get up and go to work, work hard and come back home. And whatever else needs to happen in my life will come in its own time.

I'm an officer in her Majesty's Royal New Zealand Navy. I'm a public relations officer in the Royal New Zealand Navy. Sounds good, doesn't it?

Men think highly of those who rise rapidly in the world; whereas nothing rises quicker than dust, straw, and feathers.

I'm very bad at having heroes. I don't rate anyone particularly highly because I'm so snide and competitive and not very nice.

Oh, you know. I am secretary of state. My trips aren't successful. I just talk to people.

Everybody born comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory. We come from the Creator with creativity. I think that each one of us is born with creativity.

At News Corporation, we have a history of challenging media orthodoxies.

I still haven't played a leading role in cinema or in TV, and that's something that I long for.

There were no dissidents then in the USSR because they were all killed.

Washington was a swamp. It was not somewhere that they believed people would want to go, so the idea was that people got involved as a public service, not to make a career out of it.

Life is what you make it.

Should the Catholic Church find itself discriminated against by the Obama administration on key delivery of services because of the bias and the bigotry of the administration?

Dreams. They start in your beautiful mind. Think of beautiful things and it will manifest into actions because your body will listen to you. Like it always does.