I've dedicated my life in public service to defeating climate change.
Pearl Harbor was the defining event in my life. It shaped who I am, and all of my hang-ups and my drives, I think, stem from that.
At 11 years old, I made a very definitive decision, and my decision was that I wanted to be happy. Above and beyond anything I ever did in my life, I wanted to be happy.
People try to bring negativity into my life, but it's crazy how I deflect it.
The Italian culture and values have significantly shaped who I am, and I would never intentionally demean or degrade the very culture that has been so integral to my life.
I feel like I've dreamed half of my life that hasn't happened yet, so a lot of times I'm going along, and I do stuff, and I know that I've done it. I have deja vus more than I have regular experiences. If half of your day is a deja vu, then you start to wonder, 'What is real and what isn't?'
If I had been under ObamaCare, and a beaurocrat had been trying to tell me when I could get that CT scan, that would have delayed my treatment. I was able to get the treatment as fast as I could based upon my timetable, and not the government's timetable. That's what saved my life.
My life is such that I can delegate with love.
None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction - they're always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.
One of the core organizing principles of my life is that success comes through a delicate balance between making things happen and letting things happen.
'Stand and Deliver' has been the most successful thing I have done in my life. So many people have seen it. There was really no need for me to do anything else.
My parents are both massive feminists and always led me to believe that I could dream big and do anything that I wanted in my life, almost to a delusional degree.
I can't make a song for a particular person or demographic. If I love it, I'm gonna do it. I have to perform it for the rest of my life. A song is like a tattoo - you can never get away from it.
Throughout my life I have always been amazed that people couldn't listen to other people, that they couldn't hear their best intent, that there seemed to be an enormous need to demonize.
There have been times in my life that I've had a ton of vices, and my demons have run amok for years and years and years.
Well the beauty of 'Iyanla: Fix My Life' is that men are in every show. To our surprise, some of the deepest healing demonstrations have been with the men - the sons, the fathers, the husbands - because they agree to participate with the wife or the daughter or whatever it is we are looking at, and it is there.
I'm a teacher and a writer; my life is words. When I see the denigration of language, it hurts me, and it's easy to denigrate a word by trivializing it.
I guess I get bored easily, and thank God. I don't want to all my life pound only the same key, although some artists do it very effectively. I'm not trying to denigrate anybody.
It wasn't my choice to be an open book, but when people found out what my life was like when I was 14 or 15, I didn't deny it. I think the more imperfect you are, the more human you are.
I think having worked in a department store setting, if my life had not taken a drastically different turn when I became an actor, there's a very high probability I would have continued to work at the department store.
