I love the early process of asking questions about a story and deciding which questions matter most.

A criticism is just a really bad way of making a request...so just make the request.

Follow what you are genuinely passionate about and let that guide you to your destination.

Whenever you are blue or lonely or stricken by some humiliating thing you did, the cure and the hope is in caring about other people.

The dream is not the destination but the journey.

I read once, which I loved so much, that this great physicist who won a Nobel Prize said that every day when he got home, his dad asked him not what he learned in school but his dad said, 'Did you ask any great questions today?' And I always thought, what a beautiful way to educate kids that we're excited by their questions, not by our answers and whether they can repeat our answers.

American Idol, I love. I think it's a passing fancy but not passing so soon.