I have tons of friends in the heavy-metal music world, and just going to see them inspires me.
I don't know if I would qualify as mainstream. I think I have managed to function pretty successfully on the fringes of the music world and have been able to play exactly what I have wanted the way I have wanted.
I like the idea of multidisciplinary conversations, so in that spirit, I try and make a contribution from the art world into the music world.
I love all types of music - jazz, great pop music, world music and folk music - but the music I listen to most is piano music from the 18th, 19th and 20th century. Russian music in particular.
I found that so many people in the music business started out as metalheads in the Eighties - whether they're songwriters, producers, engineers or executives, and no matter what they look like, with short hair, suits or whatever. I feel like my generation of metal kids really tends to populate the music world to a large extent.
The classical music world is so snobbish.
The decision for Beyonce and Music World Entertainment to part was mutual. We did great things together, and I know that she will continue to conquer new territories in music and entertainment.
I became an actor by accident. I suppose I figured since I was in musical comedy from the time I was a teenager, I suppose I figured that I'd always been in that world to some extent.
Setting my mind on a musical instrument was like falling in love. All the world seemed bright and changed.
Sondheim is the Shakespeare of the musical theater world.
To the outside world, I was pretty bad at everything my whole life. People didn't credit me for my musicianship.
In some ways, jazz is the most precise of art forms and the loosest in the sense that it's all about improvisation, but the musicianship required is kind of insane. To actually play with real jazz musicians is a different level of musicianship that almost has no equal in any other form of music in the world.
So many of the sounds that contemporary composers were trying to create were to be found in the traditional musics of the world. That was encouraging but also little daunting to think that you had to work so hard to be new and yet it was old.
We need to focus our energies there, not these broad, blanket, kind of statements that will make it harder for us to deal with ISIS. We need to deal with ISIS in the caliphate. We need a strategy to destroy ISIS there. You can't do that without the cooperation of the Muslim world because they're as threatened as we are.
Being in the European Union, we would be building bridges between the 1.5 bn people of Muslim world to the non-Muslim world. They have to see this. If they ignore it, it brings weakness to the E.U.
US presidents can make all the commitments and declarations they want until they are blue in the face, in the Muslim world they will always be perceived as partisan.
I think that Hassan Nasrallah is the best leader in the Muslim world.
I found that a whole series of people opposed me simply on the grounds that I was a woman. The clerics took to the mosque saying that Pakistan had thrown itself outside the Muslim world and the Muslim umar by voting for a woman, that a woman had usurped a man's place in the Islamic society.
I don't align myself with the West of the Muslim world. I align myself with what I perceive to be just and in accordance with my principles - the principles that I live my life by which are universal principles and that are embodied in the religion of Islam.
Stay faithful in things large and taking on the world, but stay faithful in those things small - because remember it's the small things, the size of a mustard seed, that ultimately moves mountains.
