A lot of time, people enter the most depressing situations, and they are the funniest people on Earth, because they have to be. It's a coping mechanism.
I have an unusual hobby: I collect pictures of people I don't know. It started when I was a kid growing up in South Florida, the land of junk stores, garage sales, and flea markets, as a kind of coping mechanism.
Given a choice, people will demand the freedom to communicate wherever they are, unfettered by the infamous copper wire.
When someone needs copper, or wood or an ag product, and they invest capital somewhere to make that happen, and people get jobs from that, and that good gets introduced to the world stage and it gets traded and moved, the whole world benefits.
Really, what I'm doing is an attempt to continue the best work of the people I adore: Francis Coppola and Scorsese and Robert Altman and Stanley Kubrick and those amazing directors whose work I grew up with and loved.
Bill Gates recently picked up the ukulele. And Warren Buffett is a huge ukulele fan. I even got to strum a few chords with Francis Ford Coppola. It blows my mind that these people, who have everything in the world they could want, have picked up the ukulele and found a little bit of joy.
I mean, it's amazing that I get to meet all these people. I've learned so much from all of them. I just worked with Sofia Coppola and that was amazing. I learned so much from her. I can't even describe how much fun I had.
I've always said that: 'We as black people, if you want respect, you have to give each other respect.' You can't demand respect from white people and the cops if we don't respect each other.
The only people who distrust the cops are crooks. They're not out there just harassing innocent people. Maybe sometimes they do. But there's no inherent situation where cops are deliberately out there harassing people.
Because my parents were illegal, they couldn't trust anybody. They were always nervous. A neighbor could be like, 'These people are making too much noise, their children are making too much noise,' and the cops could knock at our door and ask for our papers, and that's it. It's that simple. So you're always a little closed.
I've had times where one of my roommates was moving out of the house in college, and because we were the only black people in that neighborhood, the cops got called, and we had guns drawn on us. Came in the house, without knocking, guns drawn on my teammates and roommates. So I have experienced this.
You got to be able to reinvent yourself and come up with new ideas because everybody is going to try to copy, which is what you want. You want people to start saying what you say.
I've been imitated so well I've heard people copy my mistakes.
People ask me where I got my singing style. I didn't copy my style from anybody.
I think art is the only thing that's spiritual in the world. And I refuse to forced to believe in other people's interpretations of God. I don't think anybody should be. No one person can own the copyright to what God means.
I have always found it interesting... that there are people who regard copyright infringement as a form of flattery.
People have a copyright on their own life.
I have no problem with the adventure travel movement. It makes better, more sensitive people. If you get people diving on a coral reef, they're going to become more respectful of the outdoors and more concerned with the threats that places like that face and they're going to care more about protecting them than they would have before.
You never know how things will last, if they will last, and how people will use them in the future. It was a fun movie for young people at the time in the 80s; but it struck a cord with people and it has lasted so I'm very proud of being a part of that.
Every year, millions of people from Iran and Iraq travel to each other's countries, and we also have marriages between Iraqis and Iranians. Many Iranians were born in Iraq, and many Iraqis were born in Iran. This is a kind of special, cordial amicable ties.
