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.

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?

A lot of times on tour it's about 'OK where am I today? Wow I'm in Costa Rica. What is their famous dish?' And it's about trying the food and really experiencing it.

I think in the end when you're famous people like to narrow you down to a few personality traits. I think I've just become this ambitious say-whatever's-on-her-mind intimidating person. And that's part of my personality but it's certainly not anywhere near the whole thing.

A library to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.

I kept saying that I'd never live in L.A. and I didn't think I would. But that's where the work is and I ended up making a lot of friends there and my old friends moved out to Los Angeles too. And also I think when you're famous its hard to live in a small town.

The whole 'American Idol' way of looking at things is the antithesis of what I grew up with. There are a whole lot of kids wanting to be famous now whereas if I'd even mentioned that word to one of my teachers I would have got into a whole load of trouble.

I was famous overnight. I went from nowhere to being really big.

Exposure makes you famous not just good work. Famous is being plastered everywhere.

I made my living being 20 or 30 pounds heavier than the average model. And that's where I got famous.

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.

If you want to be a rock star or just be famous then run down the street naked you'll make the news or something. But if you want music to be your livelihood then play play play and play! And eventually you'll get to where you want to be.

When I'm living in the world of luxury and celebrity which is where I found myself for a large part of my life it's a walk-on part. Not a vital necessity like it is for so many people. I enjoy it but I can see right through it!

I want to be famous everywhere.

The importance of human life should be universally respected - and that refers to children before they are born and after. All children have the right to be brought up in a loving two-parent family where the notion of divorce is not even possible.

And whereas women had to fight to find their way into the workforce men are now fighting to reclaim their place in the family structure.

For me it's about the way I carry myself and the way I treat other people. My relationship and how I feel about God and what He does for me is something deeply personal. It's where I came from my family I was brought up in a religious household and that's very important to me.

It's one of the worst-kept secrets of family life that all parents have a preferred son or daughter and the rules for acknowledging it are the same everywhere: The favored kids recognize their status and keep quiet about it - the better to preserve the good thing they've got going and to keep their siblings off their back.

Touring is tough. You're almost in a haze because you don't really know where you are half the time: You're in a hotel room one moment and the next thing you know you're onstage performing for 60 000 people then you're back on an airplane. It's very hectic and I couldn't do it without my family.

Even though I have a nice house nice family the rest of my generation is still in South Central L.A. My cousins my brothers my sisters they don't wanna move out. They don't want to and they don't have the means to sustain it. That's where my heart is and that's what I think about all the time.

The extraordinary thing about India is that it's such a family place. It's full of families everywhere.

Choosing to be in the theatre was a way to put my roots down somewhere with other people. It was a way to choose a new family.

A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street anymore without a convoy and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal family or an animal in a zoo and zoo animals have been known to die from stares.

My family moved a lot as a kid. We started in Colorado where I lived for five years. We moved to Chicago for two years to San Francisco for one year Connecticut for seven Oregon for a couple years and then I went to school.