People become so deeply attached to the sound of one period that they blow a fuse when you move on. I've heard people complain bitterly about recordings they haven't even heard.
People make a big fuss over you when you're President. But I'm very serious about doing everything I can to make sure that it doesn't go to my head.
It's difficult to feel that people are looking at you in the street. I don't like the fuss.
Some people put a lot of fuss around them. I'm not an entertainer. Let's not get things confused.
When I did 'Jerry Springer: The Opera,' there was a big fuss, largely centered around the misrepresentation of its content. Had Twitter existed then, that would have been over in a week because people who had actually seen it would have been able to get control of the story through social media.
I am very fussy; I am very detailed; I nag a lot. So in a sense, I am like Mr. Ping. I am temperamental, I am emotional, I'm fussy, and I'm very exact. And I want people to not fail; I want them to execute - all those things Mr. Ping wants in other people. Or animals.
There are people who claim to be instinctive cooks, who never follow recipes or weigh anything at all. All I can say is they're not very fussy about what they eat. For me, cooking is an exact art and not some casual game.
I don't try to communicate with my 'audience'. I don't bother with that any more. I used to try to have conversations with people, but it's futile.
The world, post-Katrina, was a hard time for my city. The hardest time. For people who didn't live through it, no words can fully express the pain, the rage, the grief, and the futility we New Orleanians felt. For the people who did, words seemed like a feeble protest against a relentless night without end.
War continues to divide people, to change them forever, and I write about it both because I want people to understand the absolute futility of war, the 'pity of war' as Wilfred Owen called it.
If you think in terms of a year, plant a seed; if in terms of ten years, plant trees; if in terms of 100 years, teach the people.
I have a retro feel to my work, to my person, but I also have a futuristic view of what's possible. We can have people in pop that have more diverse looks and attitudes.
I feel fuzzy inside when I see good people make it.
If you're soft and fuzzy, like our little characters, you become the skinny kid on the beach, and people in this business don't mind kicking sand in your face.
Moammar Gaddafi, who has called himself the 'Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya,' should go down in history with the Emperor Bokassa and Idi Amin as a grotesque reminder of why people have the right to change their government.
Bin Laden always wanted to get rid of Mubarek and Ben Ali and Gaddafi and so on, claiming that they were all infidels working for America, and in fact, it was millions of ordinary people who peacefully, more or less - certainly in the case of Tunisia and Egypt - got rid of them.
It's no secret that in our society, and many before, people are trend followers. For some reason, they feel better about themselves if they are dressed in the latest fashion or have the newest tech gadget.
Some people are a little bit afraid about the future because they see all these gadgets and gizmos coming down the pike and they think they're too old to learn all this new stuff. But eventually they begin to realize, 'Hey, some of this stuff is useful.'
There are times when I have to take, I call it a 'silence bath,' where I shut off all of the external gadgets. I go walk around, talk to people, and just live life for a while.
Sometimes it occurs to me that the job of a serious cultural critic mostly consists in telling the generality of people that their opinions - on films, on books, on all manner of widgets, gadgets and even the latest electronic fidgets - simply aren't up to scratch.
