I don't think losing things - in my case, the use of my legs - really damages or hurts you. What hurts people a lot is taking humiliation. A lot of the wars going on right now in the Middle East aren't about poverty and exploitation. They're about humiliation. For a long time, the British and French have been humiliating the people of the Middle East, and encouraging people like Israel to do the same. Israel started out as a socialist state, but we always encouraged them to become rather racist and look down on the local inhabitants, which they now do. It's sad that's happened.

The cultural mix that's happened in the United States is wonderful! Funny enough, one of the most wonderful things about it is that there is no American race.

I understand why Vladimir Putin is very popular in Russia - he's probably the first Russian leader to not apologize for being Russian. People always pin it down to one man, but there's hundreds of millions of Russians of various sorts. Putin does seem to be very popular in Russia, if only because he stands up for Russians wherever they are, which is exactly what Americans do with Americans, of course.

There are singers that I have enjoyed, from Nina Simone and Ray Charles onward. But the music that made music the number one thing for me as a youth was jazz.

What keeps me going is a constant sense of disappointment with what I've already done.

There are a lot of composers who were fantastic, but I challenge them to write a record that you could play five times a day for two months on the radio, songs that people will want to dance to on a Saturday night.

People are quite shocked when you remind them that Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra never wrote a song that they recorded in their lives, as far as I know.