The secret to understanding me is I'm not trying to be anybody other than who I actually am. People want candid refreshing leadership. And I've always tried to go with solutions. You know I've always tried to say here's how we get our economy growing here's why we get our debt under control. That's what Mitt Romney is offering.

For the longest time I was brought up listening to only two genres of music pop and rock. So in the past few years I've been trying to expand my interests because I think that you can only write to the extent of your knowledge and if your knowledge is limited you can't write past that.

Growing up in Nashville especially in a music business family means growing up with knowledge that seems like common sense until later in life when you realize people spend thousands of dollars a semester trying to learn or pretending to learn while looking for some intern job on music row.

That was really so upsetting when you are trying to pass on some very serious knowledge and be basically treated worse than a student coming off the street because his father pays the tuition. Come on. Give me a break. This is no school. This is a joke.

The idea of trying to create things that last - forever knowledge - has guided my work for a long time now.

That's how easy baseball was for me. I'm not trying to brag or anything but I had the knowledge before I became a professional baseball player to do all these things and know what each guy would hit.

I feel like I've reached an age where I can relax a little bit with the knowledge of what I've been through take all that experience and use it. I love the challenge of trying to get back to where I've been and beyond it.

To my knowledge I was the first guy really to do what I do. And then later on different comedians started trying doing it.

It's just us trying to start a movement where everybody passes on a bit of cooking knowledge. We estimate that one person can potentially affect 180 others very quickly so we're just trying to spread the word.

You don't have to be a brain surgeon to be a valuable person. You become valuable because of the knowledge that you have. And that doesn't mean you won't fail sometimes. The important thing is to keep trying.

When you deal with a person who's experiencing dementia you can see where they're struggling with knowledge. You can see what they forget completely what they forget but they know what they once knew. You can tell how they're trying to remember.

We don't know all the answers. If we knew all the answers we'd be bored wouldn't we? We keep looking searching trying to get more knowledge.

I'm hungry for knowledge. The whole thing is to learn every day to get brighter and brighter. That's what this world is about. You look at someone like Gandhi and he glowed. Martin Luther King glowed. Muhammad Ali glows. I think that's from being bright all the time and trying to be brighter.

Collecting intelligence information is like trying to drink water out of a fire hydrant. You know in hindsight It's great. The problem is there's a million dots at the time.

The reason we are doing these types of pat downs and using the advanced imagery technology is trying to take the latest intelligence and how we know al Qaeda and affiliates want to hurt us they want to bring down whether it is passenger air craft or cargo aircraft.

We're not trying to harass the average American. We need to convert this now to a risk-based system with TSA concentrating and focusing on intelligence on security setting up again the parameters of which we do this.

I mean enormous pressure was brought to bear - Valerie Amos Lady Amos went round Africa with people from our intelligence services trying to press them. I had to make sure that we didn't promise a misuse of aid in a way that would be illegal.

Skill is successfully walking a tightrope between the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. Intelligence is not trying.

Every song you're trying to find something that going to connect in different ways but for me the songs that I'm really drawn to are inspirational songs that lift you and that everybody can relate to no matter where you're from.

I try not to put anything political on the forefront of what I'm trying to do creatively. At the same time I do think it's wonderful when I hear people say that it's inspirational that I'm an Indian woman on camera. My life is very diverse and my friends are a diverse group of people.

It's just a way of trying to get to a third thing that's not particular to any quote-unquote genre. It's been great for me it's really opened me up and gotten me to use that part of my imagination. It's very scary in a lot of ways and just as exciting.

No matter how mistaken Communist ideas may be the experience and knowledge gained by trying them out have given a tremendous impetus to thought and imagination.

Every time you get on a stage or in front of a camera the whole exercise is about imagination. You're constantly depicting something that doesn't exist and trying to find the reality of it. Once you settle on that premise everything else is a matter of degrees.

I think I'm too cynical for L.A. My sense of humor doesn't go down well here which probably affects my love life. I need to have a laugh track following me around so people know I'm trying to be funny.