Nothing in life is to be feared it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more so that we may fear less.

A child understands fear and the hurt and hate it brings.

What is needed rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance is understanding fear that means watch it learn about it come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear not how to escape from it.

I always thought it was strange when these artists like Kurt Cobain or whoever would get really famous and say 'I don't understand why this is happening to me.' There is a mathematical formula to why you got famous. It isn't some magical thing that just started happening.

I'm terrified of being too famous. What I'm really afraid of is that the audiences will go into the theater and not be able to forget that it's me that fame will stand in the way of my acting. I want to keep being able to change into different shapes and different personalities.

I worked on scores. I went to the musical library in Berlin which is very famous. I discovered that we had scores of Beethoven printed scores of Beethoven that are full of mistakes. Not the wrong or false notes but the wrong dynamic understandable things.

A lot of stand-up comedy guys when they get a little famous just give up their stand-up career and it cancels out the thing that set them apart.

Quite often I can be in a bookshop standing beneath a great big picture of myself and paying for a book with a credit card clearly marked John Grisham yet no one recognises me. I often say I'm a famous author in a country where no one reads.

I'd love to live in Ireland but I'd like to live as me not what someone thinks I am. People don't understand - I lived there before I was famous.

It was deeply important for me to understand where Mandela came from. Because we know where he was going and that's a famous story but who was he? Where did he come from? What was his upbringing?

I always loved working as an actress but I didn't understand why I couldn't just opt out of being famous. And then I realized you can and I think I did. And eventually I came to understand that you can do that and also keep working.

I have a profound empathy for people who are in the public eye whether they manifest it themselves or whether it happened by accident - it doesn't matter to me. I think there's a great misunderstanding of what it is to be famous.

But I am Armenian and I understand what it is to lose a country and lose a family and have massacres and genocides and everything against my people.

I grew up in a family where the internalized understanding was that the kids were going to grow up into a better world. I worry because I don't think my kids are going to have that. The world is very scary. The world would be scary without the choices the current administration made but they just exacerbated it. And it ticks me off. I want my kids to have a good life.

Anyone that has a job that takes them away from home I think can understand the difficulties in maintaining consistency not only with your family and those you love but with your friends.

Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family society and state in which we live.

Given my last position that I was the first U.S attorney post 9/11 in New Jersey I understand acutely the pain and sorrow and upset of the family members who lost loved ones that day at the hands of radical Muslim extremists. And their sensitivities and concerns have to be taken into account.

My encounters with racism are sort of second-hand situations where I might be standing around with a group of white friends and someone makes a comment that they wouldn't make at my family reunion.

I eat a little bit of everything and not a lot of anything. Everything in moderation. I know that's really hard for people to understand but I grew up in an Italian family where we didn't overdo anything. We ate pasta yes but not a lot of it.

I'm still very connected to my family to the world I grew up in. I understand what it means to be afraid that you can't pay a doctor's bill. Or to have to make the choice between buying a band uniform for a seventh-grader and making the insurance payment on time. That will never leave me. It was how I lived until I was well into my adult years.

I grew up in a family of strong women and I owe any capacity I have to understand women to my mother and big sister. They taught me to respect women in a way where I've always felt a strong emotional connection to women which has also helped me in the way I approach my work as an actor.

I've never had a very closely connected family. My parents split up when I was young and I was living with my mom for a little while then I was kind of just on my own really young. It wasn't some kind of global tragedy it was just never really a very close-knit family. So there was support in the sense that they didn't stand in my way.

People had this image of the Jacksons as the perfect American family and I destroyed that image. But what people have to understand is writing that book was very healing for me.

Growing up I was taught that a man has to defend his family. When the wolf is trying to get in you gotta stand in the doorway.