It doesn't bother me one iota that most of my career has been playing people who are not that - well, let's say that people wouldn't aspire to be like them.
If a woman is successful, then she's deemed to be the exception that proves the rule. If a woman fails, well, we're all failures. That kind of underlying approach to our gender doesn't seem to me to have changed an iota.
Certainly I'm not going to sit on the Internet all day and read what Sam from Iowa is saying about me. But I'm a sponge. I've always been a sponge.
I've still got the same friends that I grew up with, I still go to the same places that I used to go to when I was younger, and it's just a very special place to me. I'm still very proud to call Iowa home.
For Jimmy and me, Iowa holds a special place in our hearts. During his presidential campaign I spent over 100 days in Iowa. I visited 105 communities and knocked on more doors and met more Iowans than anyone thought possible.
The kids have got their iPads, but they prefer to get out climbing trees and coming out with me. That's the kind of learning I want them to have: experiences.
All of a sudden, if you think about the entire ecosystem of connected devices that can pull down information, access content and allow me to share and work and communicate, the vast majority now are not Windows computers. They are iPhones. They are iPads. They are Android devices.
I like flying to New York from London. It's like a day off for me. No phone or e-mails. Food, wine, iPod, movies, snoozing.
The '90s and early 2000s were the 'I' decade. iPhone, the iPod - everything was about me. Look where that got us? In a terrible recession.
As a former member of the IRA, I accept all the responsibilities that are due to me. But in terms of the individual circumstances, I don't comment on that.
You could count on the fingers of one hand the number of people in the north who said to me, 'When did you leave the IRA?'
When I went to the all-Ireland final - Kerry against Dublin - I couldn't get away for an hour and a half with people coming up and wishing me all the best. Not one of them said, 'Martin, when did you leave the IRA?' But every one of them knew I was in the IRA at one stage.
I don't think the majority of people - to be quite honest - care. I think they see me as someone who was at one stage of my life in the IRA, but they see me in the round, as someone who was able to make peace.
I lost a lot of friends at the hands of the British Army. The person who actually introduced me to my wife, Colm Keenan, was murdered by the British Army. He was a member of the IRA, but he was unarmed.
In countries other than Pakistan - I won't necessarily call them 'Western' - people support me. This is because people there respect others. They don't do this because I am a Pashtun or a Punjabi, a Pakistani, or an Iranian, they do it because of one's words and character. This is why I am being respected and supported there.
People asked me during the Iraq war if I was afraid to speak out. I said no.
Trash talk? Smack talk? This is an American term that makes me laugh. I simply speak the truth. I'm an Irish man.
My mother is Irish, my father is black and Venezuelan, and me - I'm tan, I guess.
I was raised Irish Catholic, but I don't consider myself Irish Catholic: I consider myself me, an American.
I was born into an Irish Catholic family in the New York area in this great, wonderful, and safe country, but the Holocaust has always haunted me, and it has long stood as a stumbling block to faith. How could such a thing be? How is that consistent with the concept of a loving God?
