“In most countries in the world, your fate and your identity are handed to you; in America, you determine them for yourself. America is a country where you get to write the script of your own life. Your life is like a blank sheet of paper, and you are the artist.”

“It's not what you say out of your mouth that determines your life, it's what you whisper to yourself that has the most power!”

“You are the architect of your own destiny; you are the master of your own fate; you are behind the steering wheel of your life.”

“Sitting and writing music on your own makes you think a lot about your life. Who are you? Would you change anything about yourself? This is where it comes from. It is like having a mirror held up in front of you, looking into yourself and asking these questions.”

“You can't write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be.”

“Complacency is habit. You in America are born and brought up in a country which is so materialistic in its outlook that complacency is the inevitable result. You are so educated at school and by the media that America becomes the limit of your seeing, your imagination, your sense of the world. It is because America is so big. You have a powerful media service which day after day puts that which is happening in America at the forefront of your consciousness. At school in America you are brought up to salute the flag everyday. This does not happen everywhere. You would not get the national flag saluted by many school children. They would think you were daft. Yet you take it for granted. Also America is so rich compared with many countries that you easily feel in its materialistic atmosphere that you are all right and do not have to think about those abroad. As a young country, you also believe that people have to stand on their own feet and make of life what they can. There is much truth in this but carried to excess it leads to the complacency that threatens world peace.”

“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”

“But I also see a problem where a lot of people don't believe in the American idea anymore. The condition of your birth doesn't determine the outcome of your life. This is America, you can make it. You work hard, play by the rules, you can rise, you can do well. That's what we're taught, that's what we believe, that's what we think of as America. Problem is, there are just generations of people in this country who do not think that.”

“You don't have to like your life to get it off your mind. You DO have to renegotiate your agreements w/yourself about it.”

“Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time”