It all starts with the script: it's not worth taking myself away from my family if I don't have something I'm really passionate about.

I guess you could say I devoted myself so strongly to my music that for awhile I forgot about my family. But I only get one set of parents and I think I forgot about that for a little while.

I am confident that nobody... will accuse me of selfishness if I ask to spend time while I am still in good health with my family my friends and also with myself.

I have these visions of myself being thirty thirty-five forty having a family.

I love cooking for myself and cooking for my family.

The principal end both of my father and of myself in the conquest of India... has been the propagation of the holy Catholic faith.

Seven and half years ago I began my own journey. For me and my family it was a time of adversity. But during that adversity I derived a deeper faith. And born out of that adversity was a commitment to devote myself to those people and to those issues that truly matter to me.

I always wanted to be honest with myself and to those who have had faith in me.

I don't really go down one path. I wouldn't call myself a Buddhist or a Catholic or a Christian or a Muslim or Jewish. I couldn't put myself into any organized faith.

I've spent the last 50 years or so steeping myself in the world's religions and I've done my homework. I've gone to each of the world's eight great religions and sought out the most profound scholars I could find and I've apprenticed myself to them and actually practiced each faith.

There were periods of my life when a lot of people didn't believe in me. I still had faith in myself. I really had to ask myself life questions. Where do I see myself in five years? Create a ladder for yourself and walk up the steps. Climb that ladder.

In my career as an actor there is a catchphrase that Scofield always says often in regards to his brother 'Have a little faith.' In my own career as an actor there were times when I was the only one who believed in myself in the face of the odds.

Over the years my mother's steadfast faith in God has inspired me particularly when I had to perform extremely difficult surgical procedures or when I found myself faced with my own medical scare.

It's lack of faith that makes people afraid of meeting challenges and I believed in myself.

I - and I still consider myself I'm sorry to tell you a Marxist and a Communist but I couldn't help noticing how all the best Marxist analyses are always analyses of a failure.

So I try not to have any actual expectations for myself for any level of success or failure.

I understand the harsh feelings and sentiments from my opponents and their supporters because I myself have been defeated twice in my political life in the past and I understand very well it is hard to accept your own failure.

Divorce is so common and accepted in America that beating myself up over it may sound ridiculous. But I was raised to believe that divorce wasn't an option to me divorce equaled failure. I wasn't able to change that equation until I found myself in the right relationship.

I'm fully aware that things that resonate and become real hits are the exception to the rule so much so that I've wired myself for failure.

Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.

I really don't think life is about the I-could-have-beens. Life is only about the I-tried-to-do. I don't mind the failure but I can't imagine that I'd forgive myself if I didn't try.

I didn't know if I had the music for it or if I could pull off the larger concert experience. Then I realized if I can just continue to be myself I'll be all right.

With 'Bright Star' and with 'The Piano ' too I felt a kind of sadness about it being in such a different era because of my lack of experience with the era. And one of the ways I'd get over it is to remind myself that every film even if it's contemporary creates its own world.

When I'm writing I'm constantly thinking about myself because it's the only experience I have to draw on. And I don't see an exact reflection of myself in every face in the audience but I know that my songs have validity to them and that's why the fans are there.