I'm doing a new musical on Broadway which opens in October called 'The Boy from Oz ' where I play Peter Allen. For those of you who don't know he became first famous in America for marrying Liza Minelli.

I became very famous as a teenager and my name and photo were splashed in all the media. They made me larger than life so I wanted to live larger than life and the only way to do that was to be intoxicated.

Dates with actors finally just seemed to me evenings of shop talk. I got sick of it after a hile. So the more famous I became the more I narrowed down my choices.

I thought the more famous I became the more friendships I would have but the opposite was true.

Because I didn't have brothers I was always interested in the kids down the street that had four brothers in their family so I became one of them - but it was not my family.

Getting and keeping my immunity became very important to me. For I needed to take care of myself and my family. No one else was worried about me.

When Nirvana became popular you could very easily slip and get lost during that storm. I fortunately had really heavy anchors - old friends family.

Music was your real passion this thing you held dear even above family. It was this relationship that never betrayed you. Once it became your job - this thing that was highly visible this thing that became about commerce - that's when you were holding onto music like it was a palm tree in a hurricane.

Because I didn't have brothers I was always interested in the kids down the street that had four brothers in their family so I became one of them - but it was not my family. I've always been attracted to temporary families. They tend to be lost characters.

I'm a girl from a good family who was very well brought up. One day I turned my back on it all and became a bohemian.

My father was brought up in an orphanage in the Catskills. He was a factory worker. And because his family wasn't there for him family was everything. We could disagree inside the house but outside the house it was us against the world. So when I became a drag actor he looked sideways but said okay.

Most success springs from an obstacle or failure. I became a cartoonist largely because I failed in my goal of becoming a successful executive.

I eventually became proud of my strikeouts because each one represented another learning experience.

Have you ever watched someone become American? Last week at a national citizenship conference I organize thirty immigrants from 17 countries swore an oath and became citizens of the United States. It was a stirring experience for the hundreds of people in the room.

No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.

I did a play called Throne of Straw when I was 11 at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles. It became really clear to me at that point that I enjoyed acting more than any other experience I was having.

I never intended for the Monster Ball to be a religious experience it just became one.

It became clear to me in an instant that living a gay life without publicly acknowledging it is simply not enough to make any significant contribution to the immense work that lies ahead on the road to complete equality.

If China is helping its domestic industries charge an artificially low price for solar panels and other environmental goods then China is violating international trade rules that it agreed to when it became a member of the World Trade Organization.

The very effect of the education they were given... was to make men think and thinking they became less and less satisfied with the miserable pays they received.

Unfortunately the real achievements of children on the ground became debased and devalued because Labor education secretaries sounded like Soviet commissars praising the tractor production figures when we know that those exams were not the rock-solid measures of achievement that children deserve.

Making the City Of Joy gave me the best political education of my life. It became a wrestling match between an Englishman who had gradually ceased to be a Marxist and a culture that was becoming more Marxist by the day.

Freedom begins with what we teach our children. That is why Jews became a people whose passion is education whose heroes are teachers and whose citadels are schools.

As skills and energy became more of a demand people who didn't have skills just got left behind got shuttled to the side. Education didn't keep up with their promise. Education didn't prepare them for this new world. Jobs went overseas.