They may call me a sinner but I am at peace with myself.

As a young boy I read 'Cheaper by the Dozen' and immediately became neurotic about my use of time. It taxed me severely but only for the next 50 years. But I think it also allowed me to discipline myself to sit in the chair and be a writer where one of the most needed qualities is patience.

And so at the age of thirty I had successively disgraced myself with three fine institutions each of which had made me free of its full and rich resources had trained me with skill and patience and had shown me nothing but forbearance and charity when I failed in trust.

I learned patience perseverance and dedication. Now I really know myself and I know my voice. It's a voice of pain and victory.

As for goals I don't set myself those anymore. I'm not one of these 'I must have achieved this and that by next year' kind of writers. I take things as they come and find that patience and persistence tend to win out in the end.

I'm torn about late parenting. I believe people should spend their twenties living and having fun and not having any regrets later. I also think people in their thirties generally make better parents but so many of my friends are having trouble - myself included - as fathers get older.

I found myself in a race with Mother Nature to play as much baseball as I could before she forced me to stop.

Each of us has a very rich nature and can look at things objectively from a distance and at the same time can have something more personal to say about them. I am trying to look at the world and at myself from many different points of view. I think many poets have this duality.

I realise that in this undertaking I place myself in a certain opposition to views widely held concerning the mathematical infinite and to opinions frequently defended on the nature of numbers.

I never sort of thought of myself as a comedy writer by nature.

I have resolved on an enterprise that has no precedent and will have no imitator. I want to set before my fellow human beings a man in every way true to nature and that man will be myself.

If I have been of service if I have glimpsed more of the nature and essence of ultimate good if I am inspired to reach wider horizons of thought and action if I am at peace with myself it has been a successful day.

I look at an ant and I see myself: a native South African endowed by nature with a strength much greater than my size so I might cope with the weight of a racism that crushes my spirit.

For myself I hold no preferences among flowers so long as they are wild free spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!

I'm not trying to keep up or adapt. I'm allowing myself to grow evolve and create new music.

When you grow up in the music industry trying to be Britney Spears because that's what sells records and then you realize 'All I have to do is be myself? I should have thought of that a long time ago ' it feels good to have success come from what's actually inside of you.

I've programmed myself musically to come up with love-feeling tracks that are romantic sexy but classy all in one. And that's the challenge. Once I create that music then the lyrical content starts to come - you know the stories and things like that.

Half the time I feel like I'm appealing to the downer freaks out there. We start to play one downer record after another until I begin to get down myself. Give me something from 1960 or something let me get up again. The music of today is for downer freaks and I'm an upper.

It's really hard for me to sometimes put myself out there like 'Hey how do you feel about making music together?' because maybe I'm afraid of rejection or I don't want to put anybody out. It's the Southerner in me like 'I don't mean to bother you but do you mind making a song?'

I feel this music has nurtured me as I've been immersing myself in it. I've felt supported by it.

It is jazz music that called me to be a musician and I have always sang the songs that moved me the most. Singers like Frank Sinatra and myself we interpret the songs that we like. Not unlike a Shakespearean actor that goes back to the greatest words ever written we go back to the greatest songs.

I don't like to be labeled to be anything. I've made the mistake before myself of labeling my music but it's counter-productive.

In the course of transferring all my CDs to my iPod I have found myself wandering the musical hallways of my past and reacquainting myself with music I haven't listened to in years.

I've had to keep exploring different ways of presenting the music so I don't repeat myself.