"Your success story is a bigger story than whatever you're trying to say on stage. Success makes life easier. It doesn't make living easier."

"My image had always been very heterosexual, very straight. So it was a nice experience for me, a chance to clarify my own feelings about gay and lesbian civil rights."

"While I wasn't very good at much else in school, in my creative-writing classes or when we had to do some writing in my English classes, I tended to do better at it."

"I can sing very comfortably from my vantage point because a lot of the music was about a loss of innocence, there's innocence contained in you but there's also innocence in the process of being lost."

"I've had an experience through music that has touched almost every part of me. It educated me in ways that I didn't get educated in school. So we try to lay on a bit of that, through being funny, being serious, playing hard."

"I think you can get to a point where nihilism, if that's the right word, is overwhelming, and the basic laws that society has set up - either religious or social laws - become meaningless."

"You can go from doing something quite silly to something dead serious in the blink of an eye, and if you're making those connections with your audience then they're going to go right along with it."

"You're always in a box, and you're an escape artist if you do what I do - or if you're a creative person, period. You build your box, and then you escape from it. You build another one, and you escape from it. That's ongoing."

"You have to create the show anew, and find it anew, on a nightly basis."

"We all have stories we're living and telling ourselves."

"I looked at myself, and I just said, 'Well, you know, I can sing, but I'm not the greatest singer in the world. I can play guitar very well, but I'm not the greatest guitar player in the world.' So I said, 'Well, if I'm going to project an individuality, it's going to have to be in my writing.'"

"When it comes to luck, you make your own."

"If you are a kid, reading is really important stuff."

"If you are dyslexic, your eyes work fine, your brain works fine, but there is a little short circuit in the wire that goes between the eye and the brain. Reading is not a fluid process."

"If you're asking your kids to exercise, then you better do it, too. Practice what you preach."

"It caused more problems as a young kid, because the simple process of perceiving words on a piece of paper was hard for me. Many people think dyslexic people see things backwards. They don't see things backwards."

"Nobody has milked one performance better than me - and I'm damned proud of it."

"Our mission for younger people is to do our best to make exercise cool, hip - the thing to do."

"When the time comes for your brain to process the information, the second word comes up faster than the first one. So when it's in your head, all of a sudden, it comes out backwards and you think of the word backwards."

"I always thought everybody else was better than me."

"I was a dyslexic kid."

"It's about working when nobody's watching."

"That's the most important thing you do in your life - raise children and try to do the best job as a parent and give your kids the best shot in life to go out there into the big, bad world."

"My mom is, for 89 years old, is extraordinarily open-minded."