You say something stupid and the next morning you'...

These days, with 'American Idol' and all the other reality shows, young people become famous overnight, and that can be very difficult to handle, the way photographers follow you around and study your every move.

For a Jewish guy, I've recorded a lot of Christmas albums.

First of all, I've been having a wonderful run of luck with cover albums, songs I didn't write. I had five pop cover albums and two Christmas albums, and they were all very successful.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

Probably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age, when the eager passions of youth are cooled, and the infirmities of age not yet begun as we see that the shadows, which are at morning and evening so large, almost entirely disappear at midday.

I saw how many people were poor and how many kids my age went to school hungry in the morning, which I don't think most of my contemporaries in racially segregated schools in the South thought very much about at the time.

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.