There needs to be a shift in consciousness; there needs to be an absolute wake-up call before society can actually make the kind of incredibly significant changes that need to happen.

Our ancestors are totally essential to our every waking moment, although most of us don't even have the faintest idea about their lives, their trials, their hardships or challenges.

In memory, you can access something from the past, anything that you've experienced that you remember - it's there. Now, you might have a memento of it in a photograph or in a film or a building or some clothes that you wore. There might be something that connects you to this memory. But all of us are just all caught in this time, whatever that is.

I can't understand why the front pages of newspapers can cover bird flu and swine flu and everybody is up in arms about that and we still haven't really woken up to the fact that so many women in sub-Saharan Africa - 60 percent of people in - infected with HIV are women.

My first understanding of HIV and AIDS was like everybody else from my generation. In the mid-'80s, we heard about this, and it was terrifying, because we knew nothing about how to respond to it appropriately, and we didn't really understand about how the virus is passed. There was a lot of misconception about that.

The inner world is very potent for me - I don't ascribe to any God or Jesus or Buddha - I just have a sense of it and revere it along with the natural world and human consciousness.

At times, I've been so absolutely terrified of what I was about to do, whether it was public speaking or performance. Whatever it was, sometimes it had me really, really shaking in my shoes, and I decided that I was going to do it no matter what. And, of course, the critic is there, and afterwards, there's this, "Was it good enough? Was it really all I wanted to say?"