Men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they work the least for they are thinking out inventions and forming in their minds the perfect idea that they subsequently express with their hands.

I never expected to get the Tom Jones treatment and it amazes me that I do. Strangely it's women who throw their underwear at me when I'm performing live. My male fans tend to be quite shy. My female fans are wild. I never know what to do with all the lingerie that lands at my feet. Maybe I should open a shop.

The connections between and among women are the most feared the most problematic and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.

Know that there is so much more to you than your body. It's not just about perfecting the steps you must trust your instincts to tell deep emotional stories through the steps that you are performing.

Originally the dream was about traveling and developing a job that would permit me to travel. And I decided to go into street performing because it was a traveling job it would let me go around the world.

Quite honestly I never had a desire to be an actor. I tell people I did not choose acting acting chose me. I never grew up wanting to be an actor. I wanted to play football. In about 9th grade an English teacher told me I had a talent to act. He said I should audition for a performing arts high school so I did on a whim. I got accepted.

If I wasn't an actor I'd be a teacher a history teacher. After all teaching is very much like performing. A teacher is an actor in a way. It takes a great deal to get and hold a class.

My overnight success was really 15 years in the making. I'd been writing songs since I was 6 and playing in bands and performing since I was 14.

Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties passing from one step of success to another forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.

To give up the task of reforming society is to give up one's responsibility as a free man.

The first duty of society is to give each of its members the possibility of fulfilling his destiny. When it becomes incapable of performing this duty it must be transformed.

I don't remember ever deciding to become a performer. I just always was. I began performing by mimicking the performers on the new television that first took the attention away from me as the baby of the household. I continued performing to put a smile on my grandmother's face and always considered her when accepting or declining roles.

I wanted to be a dancer my whole life. And when I gave it up to act I always had a really sad part of myself that missed it and missed performing and missed being physical in that way.

Before I left for Germany I had gotten accepted to the performing arts high school in New York which was a big dream of mine. And having to leave that was very sad for me.

You put a song on the record or on tape and you stop singing it. You just don't sit around and sing it anymore unless you're performing. That's kind of sad.

When I look back at those pictures of my mother performing - and listen to her recordings - it makes me sad to think that all of that joy she found in her work came to an end. I wish she hadn't had to make that sacrifice even if it was for the benefit of my father and siblings and me.

More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.

Too many younger artists critics and curators are fetishizing the sixties transforming the period into a deformed cult a fantasy religion a hip brand and a crippling disease.

Democracy shows not only its power in reforming governments but in regenerating a race of men and this is the greatest blessing of free governments.

And what we've lost sight of is that performing manual labor with your hands is one of the most incredibly satisfying and positive things you can do.

One thing I have frankly decided is that when it comes to political reform we have two conservative parties in British politics. Both the Labour and Conservative parties have constantly and repeatedly failed to honour promises they have made about reforming cleaning modernising our clapped-out system.

I think most artists create out of despair. The very nature of creation is not a performing glory on the outside it's a painful difficult search within.

Human society sustains itself by transforming nature into garbage.

No matter how many times people say it - 'Oh I'm just writing this for myself' 'Oh I'm just doing this for myself' - nobody's doing it for themselves! You're doing it for an audience. So whether I'm performing or writing a book or playing music it's definitely to be put out there and to be received in some way definitely.