With the song 'This Christmas' I wanted to do something that was kind of different. I mean Donny Hathaway is an amazing artist. So I wanted to bring my flavor to the song so when people over the age of 45 or 50 hear it they'll be like 'OK he did his thing with that record.' It's like I can appeal to everybody and not just a younger demographic.

There's a very small group of elite actresses who are my age who people want to work with. It's not easy to get a good job with good actors.

I want to be part of the resurgence of things that are tangible beautiful and soulful rather than just give in to the digital age. But when I talk to people about this they just say 'Yeah I know what you mean ' and stare at their mobiles.

If you explode onto the scene at a very young age there are so many people pulling you in different directions. It takes time to recalibrate and see what's important.

You have to be desirable. And that's why so many woman of my age or even younger are pushed to Botox and plastic surgery all the things that people say 'Why do women do this?' Where do you go in your 50s in your career?

With age you get to a place where you don't want to knock people out. You just want to give people a hug.

People tend to become more emotionally intelligent as they age and mature.

America doesn't reward people of my age either in day-to-day life or for their performances.

I would always encourage people of any age not to be so quick to follow other people's truths but to search and follow your own moral code and live by your own integrity and mostly just be brave.

I think I'm a bit less inhibited and not thinking too much before speaking. It's not about being shameful I'm just a bit more unabashedly myself because of this thing and it probably started at age 15. I can be around people and say what I think without fear.

'Dallas' hit a chord back in the late Seventies and Eighties because it was the age of greed: here you have this unapologetic character who is mean and nasty and ruthless and does it all with an evil grin. I think people related to JR back then because we all have someone we know exactly like him. Everyone in the world knows a JR.

But look I was born in 1956 the peak year for births in US history. I think I'm very representative of many of the thought processes my generation have been through and by and large people of my age have had their imprint planted on the consciousness of western society for a long time.

People dance at any age.

What goes on in Europe concerns us greatly because if Europe comes apart the E.U. comes apart then you're going to have enormous impact on America that's a very big trading partner of ours and people own securities around the world in this day and age.

I'd like to talk about free markets. Information in the computer age is the last genuine free market left on earth except those free markets where indigenous people are still surviving. And that's basically becoming limited.

I think it's quite extraordinary that people cast me as if I'm Warren Beatty: until I met my present wife at the age of 35 you could name two girlfriends.

I was taught from a young age that many people would treat me as a second-class citizen because I was African-American and because I was female.

What I think is amazing is not that 85% of people who get married under the age of 25 get divorced it's that 15% of them stay together. How did they manage to pull that off? You almost can't wait too long. It's the single simplest measure to predict divorce.

I had the good fortune to be able to right an injustice that I thought was being heaped on young people by lowering the voting age where you had young people that were old enough to die in Vietnam but not old enough to vote for their members of Congress that sent them there.

Life expectancy in many parts of Africa can be something around the age of thirty five to thirty eight. I mean you're very fortunate if you live to that age. In fact when I went to Uganda for the first time one of the things that occurred to me was that I saw very few elderly people.

We all know now that people can look good for their age. It isn't so extraordinary I don't know why people go on about it so much.

I'm asked all the time in interviews about who I am and I know a few people my age who have a strong sense of self but I couldn't say I know myself and sum it up and give it to you in a little package. I don't know myself at all yet.

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.

People are so busy dreaming the American Dream fantasizing about what they could be or have a right to be that they're all asleep at the switch. Consequently we are living in the Age of Human Error.