School integration did not come to be the day after the Brown ruling was issued. Progress took years, and it took passion, strength, and courage from a large group of committed individuals.

Because of my faith and my imagination, I was able to enjoy my childhood, even though it was tough.

Our public portrayal of fathers has shifted during my life. TV fathers have 'evolved' from real people like Sheriff Andy Taylor, Beaver's dad Ward Cleaver and Heathcliff 'Cliff' Huxtable, to cartoon dads like Homer Simpson and Seth MacFarlane's caricatures in 'American Dad!' and 'Family Guy.'

If you're a girl, you're always Daddy's little girl. You're vulnerable, no matter how worldly or sophisticated or strong you'd become along the way. My dad Lionel let me know how proud he was, even as he kept me from being too big for my britches.

Why not add benefits for making healthy food choices, provide a transition bonus for getting off food stamps, or increase job training opportunities and income - raising minimum wage?

Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure.

Art does not, like science, set forth a permanent order of nature, the enduring skeleton of law. Two factors primarily determine its works: one is the idea in the mind of the artist, the other is his power of expression; and both these factors are extremely variable.

Seasonal changes, as it were, take place in history, when there is practically an almost universal death, a falling of the foliage of the tree of life. Such were the intervals between the ancient and mediaeval time, the mediaeval and the modern.

If my leg falls off, I'll get a prosthetic. There'd be no deep sadness about. I'd just get on with it! It's called life, and I love life. You have to be positive, and you have to crack on no matter what.

Sometimes the most positive thing you can be in a boring society is absolutely negative.

Having a birthday cake squashed into your face by young kids? Delicious. I always don a Santa suit at Christmas. Remaining childish is a tremendous state of innocence.

I've never told anyone this. But I suffer from terrible stage fright. True. You can't tell though, can you? Unbelievable, the panic. I nearly die of fear before I go on stage. Something wicked. I can't eat a thing the day before a gig. It'd make me vomit.

These days young kids don't have any place to form an epic adventure. It's more often in front of the TV screen or a laptop. That's very hard on them. They're being taught daily unsocial skills. Facebook is an unsocial skill. It's so sad.

I mean, the genuine roots of culture is folk music.

If you give me the chance, I'll destroy America for you.

It's no good being nice and young and naive. There's no good in that at all. You've got to do it all yourself, and you've gotta learn quick. And you can't look for sympathy either.

I love Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart because they're bringing irony back into American humor, which is a delicious treat. The entire Colbert persona of being extreme right-wing when he's not at all is highly amusing. He does it so well, but sometimes a little too well. My wife is convinced he's completely that way.

I'm not this callous clown walking around laughing at life all the time. I've had some serious, serious problems in my life. But I've come out with a smile.

And what we've lost sight of is that performing manual labor with your hands is one of the most incredibly satisfying and positive things you can do.

I come from a family of fishermen. Fishing is very important to us. We don't hunt. We're not gun folk.

If you're an original thinker, you are going get told 'no' a lot, and you have to be able to hear 'no' many times from the bankers and trust that at some point, someone is going to recognize that you are an artist and not a can of soda.

I grew up in a small town in Illinois, and my dad was a basketball coach. Thanks to him, I have excellent fundamentals in both basketball and baseball.

Meat is a big deal in my life. I do love breakfast food, but I don't think that's extraordinary. I'm a normal American. We love eggs and meat and potatoes and gravy.

Humor has bailed me out of more tight situations than I can think of. If you go with your instincts and keep your humor, creativity follows. With luck, success comes, too.

I hate to mention age, but I come from an era when we weren't consumed by technology and television.

Wrinkles will only go where the smiles have been.

Don't look at someone else and want to be them. Search within yourself and find out who you are and be someone positive.

I see the beauty in boxing. It teaches me strength physically, but mostly mentally. I had to learn my strength, because for so long I could have been tougher than I was.

If you don't know your worth, if you don't know your value, if you don't know how fantabulous you are - it's going to be hard for other people to see it. Being appreciative of self is beauty to me.

It took a long while for me to know that I'm beautiful. I remember going through this phase when I was younger of wanting to pass by mirrors and not look at them. That was so ridiculous. I've learned now that beauty starts from within.

We all have different things that we go through in our everyday life, and it's really important to know just at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what you face, you know, that you're going to win at the end of the day. You got to believe in yourself. You got to believe in God, know that He's going to get you through it.

Judge me if you want to. And as a matter of fact, it won't even count, 'cause the only person who can judge is God.

Self-reflection is so healthy. Journaling works for me - when I record the details of what I'm going through, whether it's a relationship issue or negative thoughts, I can look back and see how far I've come. It makes me proud to see my progress and how I got through a bad situation.

I have been able to have a family and to dedicate quality time to my two sets of twins and my husband, as well as to serve on the boards of The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research and Montefiore Medical Center.

It's OK to have a plan, to invest in your future - for your financial security, your love life, your personal fulfillment, and even your happiness. To have personal happiness as a stated goal doesn't detract from it if you get there.

I applied to only one college - the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania - and was fortunate to be accepted. After graduation, I headed to Wall Street and worked as I had dreamed.

Good ideas are like Nike sports shoes. They may facilitate success for an athlete who possesses them, but on their own they are nothing but an overpriced pair of sneakers. Sports shoes don't win races. Athletes do.

There are jobs, particularly database-oriented ones, for which computers are necessary, but for everyday office life, I question whether they have brought the productivity that their enormous cost, up to £10,000 per person, demands.

Computers are wasteful of paper and time. Once, we'd get documents with a few errors. Now, people make hundreds of copies until each sheet is flawless and memos are duplicated endlessly. Managers get swamped with emails.

Overhead will eat you alive if not constantly viewed as a parasite to be exterminated. Never mind the bleating of those you employ. Hold out until mutiny is imminent before employing even a single additional member of staff. More startups are wrecked by overstaffing than by any other cause, bar failure to monitor cash flow.

Making money is certainly the one addiction I cannot shake.

People who get trapped in the tunnel vision of making money think that is all there is to life.

It's a long, slow sunset for ink-on-paper magazines, but sunsets can produce vast sums of money.

Poetry is one of the oldest of all art forms, and one of its powers for shamans and tribal leaders was the mnemonic.

You don't have to live in a garage to write great poetry.

I want to prove that if you write in strict meter and rhyme about subjects people care about, they will buy poetry.

I am absolutely convinced that my life was redeemed by poetry.

No poetry that I'm aware of, however bad or glorious, has ever left somebody a worse person than they were before they read it.

With a poetry book I can send 100 copies out to reviewers and other people, and even do it in advance and get their response. It's difficult with iPad: how do you send it out for free, and how do you even disseminate it before it goes into their store?

As with the onset of sudden celebrity, for the newly rich, the world often becomes a darker, narrower, less generous place; a paradox that elicits scant sympathy, but is nonetheless true.