Why wouldn't you want to be the envy of your neighbors by being so good and so generous and so smart in how you use the power that you obviously have? That's my patriotism.

Some of us have such incredible things that can keep us from acting. We have the luxury of drinking such good wine, and having such good information at our fingertips. I can look up anything on my computer. And I can call any friend at the drop of a hat on my cell phone. And I can have beautiful clothing and great food in a world where people are being tortured. I have some responsibility for that.

"Is it how she moves, or how she looks?" I say it's loneliness suspended to our own like grappling hooks, And as long as she's got noise, she's fine. But I could teach her how I learned to dance when the music's ended.

I am one of those sort of "lesser" types, those sensitive types, those people who wouldn't have made it on their own if other people hadn't helped them. A straightforward capitalist society would've cut them off and let them die. So I was saved by my friends and by my family and by people who cared about me, and by modern psychotherapy that cared about women.

In the laughing times we know that we are lucky, and in the quiet times we know that we are blessed. And we will not be alone.

What happened on "As Cool As I Am" was, you know how in the `90s, "the personal is political, the political is personal"? That was a really big thing. Choices you made about how you recorded and what instruments you used and how much real versus how much synthetic. Those were choices that were seen as very political at the time.

We all do the wrong thing. And then we have to wake up the next morning and live with the fact that we have done things that are wrong.